The Mammoth Book of Cover-Ups

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Karen Silkwood

Shortly after six o’clock on the evening of 13 November 1974, labour activist Karen Silkwood left a union meeting at the Hub Cafe in the city of Crescent, Oklahoma, to drive to Oklahoma City. There she was scheduled to meet New York Times journalist David Burnham to provide him with evidence of safety violations at the Kerr—McGee Cimarron nuclear plant where she was a representative for the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers Union (OCAW). Silkwood had a bundle of documentation with her in the car.

She never made her Oklahoma City meeting. Her white Honda Civic car left Highway 74, ran along a ditch and hit the side of a concrete culvert. Silkwood was killed outright. Did she fall asleep at the wheel in a tragic accident? Or was her car shunted off the road by someone desperate to stop her whistle-blowing? The controversy eventually reached Hollywood, with Meryl Streep playing the title role in the 1983 movie Silkwood.

Karen Gay Silkwood began working in the laboratory at the Kerr—McGee Cimarron facility, which manufactured plutonium for nuclear reactors, in the fall of 1972 after her six-year marriage had broken up. She was 26. At the plant, Silkwood joined OCAW, and in the spring of 1974 she was elected to the union’s steering committee. Throughout the summer she noticed a steep decline in safety standards after a production speed-up caused a rapid worker turnover; new employees were being appointed to positions for which they had inadequate training. Silkwood herself became contaminated by airborne radioactive particles. Invited to the OCAW national office in Washington DC, she informed officials of the Cimarron plant’s unsafe procedures, which included improper storage and handling of the fuel rods themselves, some of which were defective. She also alleged that the company falsified inspection records. These OCAW headquarters officials were the first to tell Silkwood that plutonium radiation was carcinogenic and potentially lethal. The OCAW Washington officials asked her to covertly gather information, including company documents, to corroborate Kerr—McGee’s violations of safety legislation.

On 5 November 1974, Silkwood performed a routine radiation self-check and found herself at almost 40 times the legal limit for plutonium contamination. She was decontaminated at the plant and sent home with a testing kit to collect faeces and urine and for further analysis. The next day, despite performing only paperwork duties at Cimarron, she again tested positive for plutonium and was decontaminated. On the following day, 7 November, she was found to be so contaminated she was expelling plutonium particles from her lungs — and this was before she had even entered the plant. She was given a more aggressive decontamination. Health inspectors sent to her home found it to be «hot», with plutonium traces in, among other places, the bathroom and the refrigerator. The house, too, was decontaminated, and Silkwood and her two housemates were sent to Los Alamos National Laboratory for in-depth testing.

Since plutonium has to be kept under the strictest security, the question arose as to how the plutonium entered the house. According to Kerr—McGee, Silkwood herself must have carried it back to her apartment in order to paint the company in a bad light. On decontaminating Silkwood’s home, Kerr—McGee employees found pieces of lab equipment from the plant. Furthermore, Silkwood had previously inquired about the health effects of swallowing plutonium pellets.

Silkwood herself alleged that the testing jars she had been given were intentionally laced with plutonium and that Kerr—McGee was responsible, their intention being to scare her off whistle-blowing. The fact that the samples taken in new jars at Los Alamos showed much lower contamination rates than those used by Silkwood at home supports the notion of malicious planting of plutonium. Richard Raske’s 2000 book The Killing of Karen Silkwood also asserts that the soluble plutonium found in Silkwood’s body came from pellets stored in the facility’s vault, to which she had not had access for six months.

When doctors informed Silkwood that she was infected with «less than one-half of the maximum permissible body burden» of plutonium, her worries were assuaged a little and she returned to work at the lab. She also decided to go through with her plan to meet David Burnham and OCAW official Steve Wodka on the night of 13 November.