When Mark Udall represented Colorado's 2nd Congressional District, one issue that never slipped far from the top of his agenda was ensuring some sort of justice for civilian employees who got sick after working at the Rocky Flats nuclear weapons plant.

Udall was one of the architects of the legislation passed in 2000 setting up a compensation system for workers at Rocky Flats and other nuclear facilities who have contracted cancers linked to their work serving the country. And now that he's a U.S. senator, he has a larger platform and a louder megaphone to aid these civilian victims of the Cold War.

The help can't come soon enough.

Numerous reports over the years - including the Rocky's 2008 three-day series Deadly Denial - have shown the U.S. Department of Labor's process for handling claims for sick workers has hardly been "compassionate, fair and timely," as the law requires.

But as Colorado's congressional delegation prepares to meet this week to outline legislation streamlining the system for compensating injured workers and their survivors, there's reason for renewed optimism.

What's different in 2009? For one thing, Udall has the full support of Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid and a likely GOP ally in Sen. Lamar Alexander, R-Tenn. Alexander has twice co-sponsored legislation to improve and speed benefits from this compensation program.

Udall has also met with new Labor Secretary Hilda Solis and believes the Obama administration will be more responsive than its predecessor, which at times treated the compensation program as a costly annoyance rather than a debt the nation owed to those who helped win the Cold War.

The forthcoming legislation will be named after Charlie Wolf, a Rocky Flats worker who died last week after a six-year battle with brain cancer. And its intent is to make the process for reviewing benefit claims less adversarial, so that benefits can move more quickly to deserving patients.

Reforms are clearly needed. The government's methods for determining who is eligible for benefits has often been haphazard and plagued by faulty record-keeping and other inconsistencies. In many cases, it may be impossible to determine how much radiation workers were exposed to because exposure data from the federal government and its contractors disappeared or may never have been collected in the first place.

The proposed legislation would, among other things, expand the types of radiation-linked cancers that qualify for compensation. Another provision would automatically enroll workers into a streamlined compensation process, known as a "special exposure cohort," if their exposure records cannot be found and analyzed within 180 days of applying for compensation.

These patients should not be penalized simply because of bureaucratic delays or sloppy record-keeping from decades ago.

The process was designed to provide proper treatment and compensation to civilian workers in nuclear facilities that were critical to this nation's defense. It was not set up to stonewall them - so let's hope that this time Udall can find enough support from Congress and the administration to make the program work as intended.