"The societal impact of this is the emotional scars it has left. When someone dies, that's about as bad as it gets, but the emotional scars left on the survivors and the families. There can be no price attached to it. It's like taking a Holocaust victim and asking how they can be compensated." — Denise Nelson, director, Support and Education for Radiation Victims (SERV)

Anytime Dennis Nelson feels an ache, he sees the beginning of the end.

Twice Nelson has fought basal cell-carcinoma, better known as skin cancer. Twice doctors have caught the cancer, common among those who lived downwind of atomic tests, and twice he's hoped to be done with doctors and hospitals.

Atomic testing began in 1952 when Dennis was 8. His sister Margaret was born that year, at the height of fallout exposure. Dennis left Cedar City in 1958 and spent his career as a Navy physical chemist, but his toxic exposure goes back to his childhood in Utah, where he slept outdoors under a mulberry tree in summer and spring, and ate out of a garden irrigated by a runoff from gutter water rife with fallout dust.

He remembers that teachers collected students' baby teeth in those days. Kept them in a jar sitting on the window sill. He now knows they were testing for a kind of radiation that collects in the bones and the teeth.

The Nelsons lived in St. George through the 1940s until 1958, and their family has been plagued with cancers of all kinds. In a family of two adults and five children, there were seven different kinds of cancer.

"None of these people, when they were alive, were told the truth," says Denise Nelson, who is married to Dennis Nelson and is director of SERV, Support and Education for Radiation Victims, a nonprofit agency based in Bethesda, Md.

After a long illness, Dennis' sister, Margaret Nelson died.

One of the Nelson brothers had leukemia, survived and now has bladder cancer. Their mother, Hattie, died at age 47 of a brain tumor in 1966. Her son, Pershing Nelson, Washington County attorney during the testing, died of lung and bone cancer, neither of which was formally recognized as a fallout related illness and compensatable back then.

She was a meticulous attorney for the U.S. Attorney's Office in Salt Lake City. Born in 1952 in the bombings early days, Margaret Nelson died of colon cancer at 40.

"At that time, colon cancer was not compensatable, now it is," said Denise Nelson. "Compensation. This is a word that is supposed to make things good and set things straight. But the government has never come out and said these people were experimented on — that St. George was the largest outdoor experiment in the nation.

"It's a sin."

One of Denise Nelson's greatest heartaches surrounds the injustice perpetuated by a government that did not tell people the true reasons for their deaths.