Karen Silkwood

 Karen Silkwood

Karen Gay Silkwood (February 19, 1946 – November 13, 1974) was an American chemical technician and labor union activist known for raising concerns about corporate practices related to health and safety in a nuclear facility.

She worked at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site in Oklahoma, making plutonium pellets, and became the first woman on the union's negotiating team. After testifying to the Atomic Energy Commission about her concerns, she was found to have plutonium contamination on her person and in her home. While driving to meet with a New York Times journalist and an official of her union's national office, she died in a car crash under unclear circumstances.

Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site

The Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site was a nuclear fuel production facility located by the Cimarron River near Cimarron City, Oklahoma. It was operated by Kerr-McGee Corporation (KMC) from 1965 to 1975.

History

Some of the byproducts and waste from Kerr-McGee's uranium and thorium processing at its Cushing, Oklahoma refinery were transported to Cimarron in the 1960s.

The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) issued Radioactive Materials License SNM-928 in 1965 to Kerr-McGee Corporation for the uranium fuel fabrication facilities at the Cimarron site. Later, the AEC issued Radioactive Materials License SNM-1174 in 1970 to KMC for the mixed oxide fuel fabrication (MOFF) facilities at the Cimarron site.

The plant made uranium fuel and MOX driver fuel pins for use in the Fast Flux Test Facility at the Hanford Site in Washington State. Along with NUMEC, between 1973 and 1975 Kerr-McGee made the fuel pins for FFTF cores 1 and 2. The pins were quality tested by the Plutonium Finishing Plant at Hanford. The MOX pins were created by the unusual co-precipitation of Plutonium Nitrate and Uranium Nitrate solution method. The plant shut down in 1976.

In 1983 Kerr-McGee Nuclear split into Quivira Mining Corporation and Sequoyah Fuels Corporation, although both were still owned by Kerr-McGee. Sequoyah got the Cimarron plant. Sequoyah was then sold to General Atomics in 1988, but Kerr-McGee kept control of Cimarron under a subsidiary named the Cimarron Corporation. In 2005 Kerr-McGee formed a new subsidiary named Tronox, and it then gained ownership of Cimarron. Tronox was then spun off as an independent company in 2006, a few months before KMC was bought by Anadarko Petroleum. Tronox went bankrupt in 2008/2009, blaming in part the environmental debts it inherited from KMC. Tronox shareholders later sued Anadarko Petroleum (KMC's successor) for having misled investors.

Investigations

In 1975, the United States General Accounting Office published a report, Federal Investigations Into Certain Health, Safety, Quality Control and Criminal Allegations at Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation. In the report, the Comptroller General of the United States reported on working conditions at the Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation; radiological contamination and death of Karen Silkwood (an employee); and Kerr-McGee's quality assurance practices. The investigating agencies were the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the Atomic Energy Commission; the Energy Research and Development Administration, and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. These agencies studied Karen Silkwood's contamination with plutonium; the dispersion of uranium pellets on the grounds of the plant; and the unauthorized removal and possession of nuclear material from the plant.

Karen Silkwood

Karen Silkwood was employed by the facility when she died in a mysterious car crash after her union activism and whistleblowing. The summary of the abovementioned report of the US General Accounting Office concluded that Karen Silkwood was contaminated with plutonium on November 5, 6 and 7, 1974. On November 5, she was contaminated by the gloves of a laboratory glovebox used for working with plutonium. However, when Kerr-McGee examined and tested the gloves, no leaks were found. On November 6, she was again found to be contaminated. And on November 7, her nose and other parts of her body were found to be contaminated with plutonium, as was her apartment and roommate.

Her family sued Kerr-McGee for the plutonium contamination of Silkwood. The company settled out of court for US $1.38 million, while not admitting liability. Her story was chronicled in Mike Nichols's 1983 Academy Award nominated film Silkwood in which she was portrayed by Meryl Streep.

Family

Karen Gay Silkwood was born in Longview, Texas, the daughter of Merle (née Biggs; 1926–2014) and William Silkwood (1924-2004), and raised in Nederland, Texas. She had two sisters, Linda and Rosemary. She attended Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas. In 1965, she married William Meadows, an oil pipeline worker, with whom she had three children. Following the couple's bankruptcy due to Meadows' overspending, and in the face of Meadows' refusal to end an extramarital affair, Silkwood left him in 1972 and moved to Oklahoma City, where she briefly worked as a hospital clerk.

Union activities

After being hired at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site plant near Crescent, Oklahoma, in 1972, Silkwood joined the local Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers Union and took part in a strike at the plant. After the strike ended, she was elected to the union's bargaining committee, the first woman to achieve that position at the Kerr-McGee plant. She was assigned to investigate health and safety issues. She discovered what she believed to be numerous violations of health regulations, including exposure of workers to contamination, faulty respiratory equipment and improper storage of samples. She believed the lack of sufficient shower facilities could increase the risk of employee contamination.

The Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union said that "the Kerr-McGee plant had manufactured faulty fuel rods, falsified product inspection records, and risked employee safety." It threatened litigation. In the summer of 1974, Silkwood testified to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) about having been contaminated, alleging that safety standards had slipped because of a production speedup. She was appearing with other union members.

The United States Atomic Energy Commission, commonly known as the AEC, was an agency of the United States government established after World War II by U.S. Congress to foster and control the peacetime development of atomic science and technology. President Harry S. Truman signed the McMahon/Atomic Energy Act on August 1, 1946, transferring the control of atomic energy from military to civilian hands, effective on January 1, 1947. This shift gave the members of the AEC complete control of the plants, laboratories, equipment, and personnel assembled during the war to produce the atomic bomb.

An increasing number of critics during the 1960s charged that the AEC's regulations were insufficiently rigorous in several important areas, including radiation protection standards, nuclear reactor safety, plant siting, and environmental protection.

By 1974, the AEC's regulatory programs had come under such strong attack that the U.S. Congress decided to abolish the AEC. The AEC was abolished by the Energy Reorganization Act of 1974, which assigned its functions to two new agencies: the Energy Research and Development Administration and the Nuclear Regulatory Commission.[7] On August 4, 1977, President Jimmy Carter signed into law the Department of Energy Organization Act of 1977, which created the Department of Energy. The new agency assumed the responsibilities of the Federal Energy Administration (FEA), the Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), the Federal Power Commission (FPC), and various other Federal agencies.

Public opinion and abolition of the AEC

During the 1960s and early 1970s, the Atomic Energy Commission came under fire from opposition concerned with more fundamental ecological problems such as the pollution of air and water. Under the Nixon Administration, environmental consciousness grew exponentially and the first Earth Day was held on April 22, 1970. Along with rising environmental awareness came a growing suspicion of the AEC and public hostility for their projects increased. In the public eye, there was a strong association between nuclear power and nuclear weapons, and even though the AEC had made a push in the late 1960s, to portray their efforts as being geared toward peaceful uses of atomic energy, criticism of the agency grew. The AEC was chiefly held responsible for the health problems of people living near atmospheric test sites from the early 1960s, and there was a strong association of nuclear energy with the radioactive fallout from these tests.  Around the same time, the AEC was also struggling with opposition to nuclear power plant siting as well as nuclear testing. An organized push was finally made to curb the power held by the AEC, and in 1970 the AEC was forced to prepare an Environmental impact statement (EIS) for a nuclear test in northwestern Colorado as part of the initial preparation for Project Rio Blanco.

In 1973, the AEC predicted that, by the turn of the century, one thousand reactors would be needed producing electricity for homes and businesses across the United States. However, after 1973, orders for nuclear reactors declined sharply as electricity demand fell and construction costs rose. Some partially completed nuclear power plants in the U.S. were stricken, and many planned nuclear plants were canceled.

By 1974, the AEC's regulatory programs had come under such strong attack that Congress decided to abolish the agency. Supporters and critics of nuclear power agreed that the promotional and regulatory duties of the AEC should be assigned to different agencies. The Energy Reorganization Act of 1974 transferred the regulatory functions of the AEC to the new Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC), which began operations on January 19, 1975. Promotional functions went to the Energy Research and Development Administration which was later incorporated into the United States Department of Energy.

Lasting through the mid-1970s, the AEC, along with other entities including the Department of Defense, National Institutes of Health, the American Cancer Society, the Manhattan Project, and various universities funded or conducted human radiation experiments.The government covered up most of these radiation mishaps until 1993, when President Bill Clinton ordered a change of policy. Nuclear radiation was known to be dangerous and deadly (from the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945), and the experiments were designed to ascertain the detailed effect of radiation on human health. In Oregon, 67 prisoners with inadequate consent to vasectomies had their testicles exposed to irradiation. In Chicago, 102 volunteers with unclear consent received injections of strontium and cesium solutions to simulate radioactive fallout.

On November 5, 1974, Silkwood performed a routine self-check and found that her body contained almost 400 times the legal limit for plutonium contamination. She was decontaminated at the plant and sent home with a testing kit to collect urine and feces for further analysis. Although there was plutonium on the inner portions of the gloves which she had been using, the gloves did not have any holes. This suggests the contamination had come not from inside the glovebox, but from some other source.

The next morning, as she headed to a union negotiation meeting, Silkwood again tested positive for plutonium, although she had performed only paperwork duties that morning. She was given a more intensive decontamination. On November 7, as she entered the plant, she was found to be dangerously contaminated, even expelling contaminated air from her lungs. A health physics team accompanied her back to her home and found plutonium traces on several surfaces, especially in the bathroom and the refrigerator. When the house was later stripped and decontaminated, some of her property had to be destroyed. Silkwood, her boyfriend Drew Stephens, and her roommate Dusty Ellis were sent to Los Alamos National Laboratory for in-depth testing to determine the extent of the contamination in their bodies.

Questions arose over how Silkwood became contaminated over this three-day period. She said the contamination in the bathroom may have occurred when she spilled her urine sample on the morning of November 7. This was consistent with the evidence that samples she took at home had extremely high levels of contamination, while samples taken in "fresh" jars at the plant and at Los Alamos showed much lower contamination.

She thought she had been contaminated at the plant. Kerr-McGee's management said that Silkwood had contaminated herself in order to portray the company in a negative light. According to Richard L. Rashke's book The Killing of Karen Silkwood (1981/2000), security at the plant was so lax that workers could easily smuggle out finished plutonium pellets.  Rashke wrote that the soluble type of plutonium found in Silkwood's body came from a production area which she had not accessed for four months. The pellets had since been stored in the vault of the facility.

Just before her death Silkwood had charged that the plant had strayed so far from the federal nuclear code that it posed a danger to its workers and the public, and she allegedly had been collecting proof of that. Some investigators later theorized that Silkwood had also unwittingly uncovered a smuggling ring at the plant and that her documents held information about missing plutonium.

Kerr-McGee Corporation, the plant owner, argued that neither suggestion was true. The Atomic Energy Commission (AEC), the government agency that then regulated the nuclear industry, investigated the company but disregarded any trace of scandal.

however two former members of the Kerr-McGee plant management—department heads Jim Smith and Jerry Cooper—have corroborated most of Silkwood’s original allegations about the company’s disregard for safety. In addition, Smith has challenged Kerr-McGee’s explanation of what happened to substantial amounts of plutonium which were missing from its inventory.

According to Smith and Cooper, the plant operation was often dangerously sloppy and in conflict with AEC guidelines. Leaking pipes and defective equipment regularly contaminated workers with plutonium, a deadly radioactive substance that can cause cancer. Instead of stopping production, Kerr-McGee ordered its employees to continue working and did not repair the leaks until slack production periods.

At the same time, the two men claim, Kerr-McGee routinely shipped plutonium waste in unsafe leaking containers that sometimes spilled on the plant grounds and may have been responsible for contaminating an area in Kentucky where the waste was buried.

The most complete description of the plant operations comes from Smith, 45, a Korean War veteran who spent eighteen years helping make nuclear weapons at the government facility in Rocky Flats, Colorado. Kerr-McGee recruited him in 1969 to assist in setting up its plutonium factory, the second privately owned plant in the country licensed to produce plutonium fuel.

The plant was built twenty miles outside Oklahoma City on a 900-acre site next to an existing uranium plant. Smith says he never would have joined Kerr-McGee if he had known then about what he calls the company’s “devil-may-care” attitude toward nuclear safety. He did not learn until later, for instance, that the uranium plant had been dumping contaminated water into the Cimarron river that is used for swimming, fishing and drinking. Though the procedure conformed technically to AEC rules, it created the risk of a major health hazard.

Smith traces the plutonium plant’s problems to a $9.6 million AEC contract that Kerr-McGee was awarded in 1972 to produce fuel rods for the government’s experimental fast-breeder reactor. Unlike conventional nuclear reactors that are fired with uranium, fast-breeders are designed to use a volatile plutonium fuel. Smith was in charge of processing liquid plutonium into powder A second department turned the powder into small pellets that were inserted in six-foot, pencil-thin fuel rods.

Transients and students were often hired to work in the plant, he explains, and most workers were generally unaware of the menace of plutonium because they were improperly trained. Despite the warning alarm, they did not object when they were forced to work in contaminated air for days at a time. According to Smith, several workers quit or were fired without ever realizing that their health may have been jeopardized. The turnover rate was high; during a ten-month period in 1974, 99 out of 287 employees had to be replaced.

Smith estimates that at least 200 workers were contaminated with airborne plutonium during the six years the plant operated, over twice as many as Kerr-McGee reported to the AEC. Under AEC rules, all contamination incidents should have been reported and, except in minor cases, production should have halted while leaks were fixed. But Smith says the company frequently ignored these guidelines.

At one point in early 1973, after a fire filled the air with radioactive dust, Smith says he confronted his superior. “The place was highly contaminated, highly. There was no way the place should have been allowed to run. So I told him, ‘No,’ and he said, ‘Let’s go out front’—which meant I was done. So I just put the people back in there. Of course they put the people in protective gear, but protective gear is only X-efficiency. It was production first and to hell with the rest.”

Karen Silkwood, who was hired at the plant in 1972, did not initially realize the scope of the problem because her job was in the laboratory, away from the production departments. But after hearing other workers tell about the chronic contaminations she grew outraged and embarked on a campaign to have the plant cleaned up or shut down. In September 1974 she journeyed to Washington D.C. to enlist help from top officials of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International (OCAW). They asked her to return to the plant and gather evidence that could be used in a formal grievance against Kerr-McGee.

Silkwood’s detective work ended abruptly on November 13th, 1974, at about 7:30 p.m. when her car smashed into a concrete culvert. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol called it an accident, but OCAW’s investigation concluded another car deliberately forced her off the road. The AEC subsequently produced a twenty-page report about conditions at the plant which conceded Kerr-McGee was guilty of some safety violations but dismissed them as technicalities and aberrations.

In the previous two years, according to Smith, the plant suffered one near-disaster and more serious contamination incidents than he’d seen in nearly two decades at Rocky Flats. One time a tank overflowed and spilled a plutonium solution a foot deep in certain areas. One leak required thirty days to clean up, Smith says; and another was so massive it contaminated five rooms: “Everyone came out of there hotter than little red wagons,” Smith says. After yet another spill, Smith was sent to buy a hundred gallons of white paint to brush over walls and pipes to seal in plutonium flakes that couldn’t be washed off.

“The whole place was one big leak,” Smith says. “Every time you turned around there was another leak.” Kerr-McGee’s handling of plutonium outside the plant was equally haphazard, and this created a danger that could still affect thousands of people as far as three states away. The problem arose in the disposal of hundreds of barrels of left-over liquid plutonium.

Kerr-McGee converted the liquid to a solid by mixing twelve gallons of an acid with thirty-three gallons of plutonium waste and then shipped the mixture about 500 miles away to the Maxey Flats Disposal Site near Morehead, Kentucky.

Because of the particular low-cost processing the mixture sometimes became unstable. “It’d start going back to a liquid and then it looked like a big ice cube floating in a barrel,” Smith says. When that happened, the acid in the solution began to eat away at the black iron barrels. Truck drivers had to race to Kentucky and unload the drums before holes spouted. Sometimes they didn’t make it.

“They had a hell of a problem,” Cooper says. “It sometimes leaked out of the barrels before the trucks pulled out of the plant.” Once, the radioactive liquid burned through the floorboards of a semi-trailer and the whole truck had to be destroyed. “They took the wheels off and hauled the semi out and buried it,” Smith says. On at least three other occasions the waste material leaked from the drums onto the plant grounds and the soil had to be excavated and removed. Some plutonium, Smith says, was never retrieved.

But it is the residents of Morehead, Kentucky, who may have cause for the most concern. The Kerr-McGee drums were buried outside Morehead in a divonian shell, a natural rock formation that usually is nonporous. In 1972, however, state inspectors found that some radioactive waste had escaped the site and washed into nearby streams. At the time Kentucky officials were not certain of the cause of the problem and state inspectors are now examining the divonian shell to see if waste is seeping through fissures in the rock.

Charles Hardin, Kentucky’s manager of radiation control, refuses to single out Kert-McGee as the sole culprit. But some circumstantial evidence points to the Oklahoma company. The leaks were discovered in 1972—about the time Kerr-McGee started sending its waste to Morehead—and began to abate in 1975 after the plant closed down.

An even more alarming problem is the possibility that plutonium was diverted from the plant. On two occasions, Smith says, Kerr-McGee did not recover plutonium that the company had originally reported missing to the AEC. As many as fifty pounds, enough for four nuclear bombs, could be lost if Smith is correct.

They never found the plutonium that turned up missing it has never been explained where it went or who took it. One popular theory was that Karen had stumbled upon a smuggling ring inside of the kerr- McGee plant where she worked.

Smith also disputed Kerr-McGee’s claim that twenty-two pounds of plutonium were left in the plant’s system when it shut down permanently in 1975. That time, he says, he supervised the flushing of the pipes with boiling-hot nitric acid. “We could have flushed for another month,” he explains, “and we couldn’t have gotten another three ounces out of the sonofabitch. There’s no way twenty-two pounds could still be in there.”

Federal inspectors accepted Kerr-McGee’s accounting of the missing plutonium and ridiculed suggestions that the material could have been lost to thieves. (Besides the twenty-two pounds allegedly still in the plant, another sixteen pounds of plutonium remain unaccounted for in a cumulative Kerr-McGee inventory. The government attributes this to “statistical variations.”) But Smith says security at the plant was unaccountably lax. More than $5000 worth of platinum used in the plant laboratory was stolen, he says, and a stereo in a five-foot case was smuggled past guards at the front gate. In his opinion, “those guards couldn’t track an elephant in forty feet of snow.”

Smith is similarly skeptical of the AEC men who periodically visited the plant for what were supposed to be unannounced, on-the-spot inspections. “There wasn’t one time we didn’t know about an inspection three days ahead of time,” he says. “Somebody at Kerr-McGee had a connection somewhere because we’d always be told about the inspections in the morning management meeting.”

Both Smith and Cooper, however, place most of the blame for the plant’s problems on the executives at Kerr-McGee headquarters in downtown Oklahoma City. “I didn’t have any respect for the way they ran things,” Cooper says. “I felt the people at the top of the pile were totally incompetent.”

In September 1975, after spending his entire career with the company, Cooper took a radical step. He resigned and bought a service station in Cushing, Oklahoma. His resignation letter was a six-page outpouring of criticism about Kerr-McGee’s management policies. “I was told the letter would prevent me from ever getting another job with Kerr-McGee or with any other nuclear facility,” he says. “I told them that’s why I wrote it. I never want to work for Kerr-McGee or any other big corporation again.”

Three months later the last fuel rods were assembled and the front gates of the plant were locked. The Energy Research and Development Administration (ERDA), which inherited partial jurisdiction over the nuclear industry when the AEC was abolished in January 1975, had decided not to renew Kerr-McGee’s contract. Some feel this was due to lingering doubts about the Silkwood controversy.

Despite his Kerr-McGee experience and the questions it raised about nuclear safety, Smith says he believes nuclear power should remain an integral part of the U.S. energy program. Cooper, on the other hand, is less sure. “Since the Silkwood thing, I’ve done a lot of thinking,” he says. “I used to believe totally in nuclear power. Now I don’t know. Some incompetent dumb-ass could end up running a nuclear reactor next door to me. I guess maybe I’ve decided nuclear power is a bad thing, simply because of some of the yo-yos who are running it.”

In January 1977, following the publication of an article about the Silkwood case in Rolling Stone, a minority stockholder’s resolution was filed asking Kerr-McGee to turn over its records on safety and security at the plutonium plant. The resolution was brought by a Franciscan order in Garrison, New York, which owns 2400 shares of Kerr-McGee stock and which has long been affiliated with the Institute for Corporate Responsibility. In bringing the resolution, the Franciscans cited congressional testimony about the plant’s “inconceivable” disregard for safety and allegations in the Rolling Stone article that Kerr-McGee board chairman Dean McGee had intervened to halt the congressional investigation.

But the company successfully appealed to the Securities & Exchange Commission (SEC) to keep the resolution off the agenda of its annual stockholders meeting and refused to include it in the proxy statement sent to all stockholders. “We’ve dealt with many corporations concerning many issues in the past,” says Brother Robert Taylor, associate treasurer for the Franciscan order. “This is the first time we ran into a company which did not wish to discuss our concerns and which was willing to go to such great lengths to keep the resolution off the proxy.” According to Taylor, Kerr-McGee put considerable pressure on the Franciscans to drop its inquiry and, when that failed, it hired an outside law firm, one of whose partners was a former SEC official, to fight the resolution.

With the quashing of the stockholders’ resolution, and the failure of a 1976 congressional investigation of security and safety at nuclear plants, the only likely way Kerr-McGee may be held accountable for its plutonium plant operation will be through a lawsuit filed by Karen Silkwood’s estate. The suit charges Kerr-McGee with violating Silkwood’s civil rights and claims that her fate was an outgrowth of company negligence.

Until September 1977 the only former Kerr-McGee employee identified as a probable witness was Jean Jung, one of Silkwood’s co-workers who saw her carrying a folder of Kerr-McGee documents minutes before her death. A few days after Jung’s name surfaced in a pretrial deposition she returned to her home in Kingfisher, Oklahoma, and found it ransacked. Nothing of value was missing, but personal papers had been searched and left in disarray. Since then, Jung says, she has been chased by a car while driving home from work and has received several anonymous phone calls that she interprets as warnings for her not to testify.

Jerry Cooper says he also got a phone call—shortly after talking to Rolling Stone in July—informing him that he could lose his service station if he cooperates with the Silkwood lawyers. But both Cooper and Jim Smith say that, if subpoenaed, they will describe under oath what they know of the conditions Silkwood was trying to document. If that happens, their testimony could have serious consequences for their former employer.

Death

Silkwood said she had assembled documentation for her claims, including company papers. She decided to go public with this evidence, and contacted David Burnham, a New York Times journalist, who was interested in her story. On November 13, 1974, Silkwood left a union meeting at the Hub cafe in Crescent. Another attendee of that meeting later testified that Silkwood had a binder and a packet of documents with her at the cafe. Silkwood got into her Honda Civic and headed alone for Oklahoma City, about 30 miles (48 km) away, to meet with Burnham, the New York Times reporter, and Steve Wodka, an official of her union's national office.[8] Later that evening, Silkwood's body was found in her car, which had run off the road and struck a culvert on the east side of State Highway 74, 0.11 miles (180 m) south of the intersection with West Industrial Road (35.855233°N 97.584963°W). The car contained none of the documents she had been holding in the union meeting at the Hub cafe. She was pronounced dead at the scene in what was believed to be an accident. The trooper at the scene remembers that he found one or two tablets of the sedative methaqualone (Quaalude) in the car, and he remembers finding cannabis. The police report indicated that she fell asleep at the wheel. The coroner found 0.35 milligrams of methaqualone per 100 milliliters of blood at the time of her death — an amount almost twice the recommended dosage for inducing drowsiness.

Some journalists have theorized that Silkwood's car was rammed from behind by another vehicle, with the intent to cause an accident that would result in her death. Skid marks from Silkwood's car were present on the road, suggesting that she was trying to get back onto the road after being pushed from behind.

Investigators also noted damage on the rear of Silkwood's vehicle that, according to Silkwood's friends and family, had not been present before the accident. As the crash was entirely a front-end collision, it did not explain the damage to the rear of her vehicle. A microscopic examination of the rear of Silkwood's car showed paint chips that could have come only from a rear impact by another vehicle. Silkwood's family claimed to know of no accidents of any kind that Silkwood had had with the car, and that the 1974 Honda Civic she was driving was new when purchased and no insurance claims were filed on that vehicle.

Silkwood's relatives, too, confirmed that she had taken the missing documents to the union meeting and placed them on the seat beside her. According to her family, she had received several threatening phone calls very shortly before her death. Speculation about foul play has never been substantiated.

Because of concerns about contamination, the Atomic Energy Commission and the State Medical Examiner requested analysis of Silkwood's organs by the Los Alamos Tissue Analysis Program.

Public suspicions led to a federal investigation into plant security and safety. National Public Radio reported that this investigation had found that 20 to 30 kilograms (44–66 lb) of plutonium had been misplaced at the plant.

Kerr-McGee closed its nuclear fuel plants in 1975. The Department of Energy (DOE) reported the Cimarron plant as decontaminated and decommissioned in 1994.

PBS Frontline produced the program, Nuclear Reaction, which included aspects of the Silkwood story. Its website for the program includes a summary of details entitled "The Karen Silkwood Story",as printed November 23, 1995 in Los Alamos Science. The PBS program covered the risks of nuclear energy and raised questions about corporate accountability and responsibility.

Silkwood vs. Kerr-McGee

Silkwood's father Bill and her children filed a lawsuit against Kerr-McGee for negligence on behalf of her estate. The trial was held in 1979 and lasted ten months, the longest up to that point in Oklahoma history. Gerry Spence was the chief attorney for the estate, other key attorneys were Daniel Sheehan, Arthur Angel and James Ikard. William Paul was the chief attorney for Kerr-McGee. The estate presented evidence that the autopsy proved Silkwood was contaminated with plutonium at her death. To prove that the contamination was sustained at the plant, evidence was given by a series of witnesses who were former employees of the facility.

The defense relied on the expert witness Dr. George Voelz, a top-level scientist at Los Alamos. Voelz said that he believed the contamination in Silkwood's body was within legal standards. The defense later proposed that Silkwood was a troublemaker, who might have poisoned herself. Following the summation arguments, Judge Frank Theis told the jury, "[I]f you find that the damage to the person or property of Karen Silkwood resulted from the operation of this plant ... defendant Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation is liable...."

The jury rendered its verdict of US $505,000 in damages and US $10,000,000 in punitive damages. On appeal in federal court, the judgment was reduced to US $5,000, the estimated value of Silkwood's losses in property at her rental house, and reversing the award of punitive damages. In 1984, the U.S. Supreme Court restored the original verdict, in Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee Corp. 464 US 238 (1984), ruling that "the NRC's exclusive authority to set safety standards did not foreclose the use of state tort remedies." Although suggesting it would appeal on other grounds, Kerr-McGee settled out of court for US $1.38 million ($3.75 million in 2021 dollars), admitting no liability.


Sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Karen_Silkwood

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cimarron_Fuel_Fabrication_Site

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/United_States_Atomic_Energy_Commission#Public_opinion_and_abolition_of_the_AEC

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/karen-silkwood-was-right-in-plutonium-scandal-47908/

https://www.nytimes.com/1975/01/03/archives/us-says-lost-plutonium-is-only-a-small-amount.html

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/entertainment/books/1981/03/22/dying-to-tell-the-the-truth/da59f4d8-107b-4993-9bcf-8ffcbd73acb9/

https://www.washingtonpost.com/archive/politics/1979/03/13/plutonium-lost-at-plant-ex-aide-says/ef6b0faa-b5e0-4097-9e1e-f51045841357/

https://www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/karen-silkwood-the-case-of-the-activists-death-52287/