Karen Gay Silkwood (February 19, 1946 – November 13, 1974) was an American laboratory technician and labor union activist known for reporting concerns about corporate practices related to health and safety in a nuclear facility.
She worked at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site in Crescent, Oklahoma, making plutonium pellets. She was the first woman ever elected to the union's negotiating team at Kerr-McGee. After testifying to the Atomic Energy Commission about her safety concerns, she was found to have plutonium contamination in her body and 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, the circumstances of which were never explained entirely.
Her family sued Kerr-McGee for the plutonium contamination that Silkwood suffered from. 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 movie Silkwood in which she was portrayed by Meryl Streep.
Education and personal life Karen Gay Silkwood was born in 1946 in Longview, Texas, and raised in Nederland, Texas. She lived with her mother Merle, father Bill, and sisters Rosemary and Linda. In high school, Karen was a straight 'A' student and a member of the National Honor Society. Chemistry was her best subject. In the fall of 1964, she enrolled at Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, Texas on a scholarship from the Business and Professional Women's Club.
In 1965, Silkwood dropped out of college and eloped with William Meadows, an oil pipeline worker, with whom she had three children. After the couple filed for bankruptcy due to Meadows' excessive spending habits, and after his refusal to end an extramarital affair, Silkwood left him in 1972 and relocated to Oklahoma City where she worked briefly as a hospital clerk.
Employment and union activities In August 1972, Silkwood was hired as a metallography laboratory technician with the Kerr-McGee Corporation at their Cimarron River plutonium production plant near Crescent, Oklahoma that had opened two years prior. She also joined the Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers Union (OCAW) local.
In November 1972, when the union's contract had expired, she participated in a strike to protest poor working conditions. Kerr-McGee succeeded in breaking the strike by hiring people from the surrounding area to cross the picket line. The company's managers also began "working behind the scenes to entice workers to sign a petition calling for a decertification election to eliminate the union." The strike ended after ten weeks after employees were threatened with termination. In the early part of 1974, Kerr-McGee was behind in production and began to schedule employees to work seven-day workweeks as well as twelve hour shifts. The plant experienced a sudden increase in spills and contamination events. On July 13, 1974, almost two years into her employment, Silkwood experienced her first contamination which occurred in the emission spectroscopy lab. Testing discovered contamination within the air filter.
In August 1974, Silkwood was elected to the OCAW local's three-person bargaining committee, the first woman to hold such a position at Kerr-McGee. It was a critical time for the local as the decertification drive had collected enough signatures to force an election on October 16. Silkwood's specific union duties included investigating health and safety issues. She discovered at the Cimarron plant what she considered to be numerous violations of health regulations, such as exposure of workers to contamination, faulty respiratory equipment, and improper storage of samples. She believed the lack of sufficient shower facilities was increasing the risk of employee contamination. She also found evidence of missing or misplaced plutonium.
On September 26, 1974, Silkwood and the two other committee members attended a meeting in Washington, D.C., with Tony Mazzocchi, OCAW's legislative director. The committee members voiced their complaints about the dangerous workplace conditions and sought advice on how to win the upcoming decertification election. In their discussions, Mazzocchi learned that the committee members (and presumably the rest of the Cimarron plant) were not adequately informed about the hazardous material they were working with. He later wrote, "When I explained the connection between plutonium exposure and cancer, it took Karen by surprise.": "When he [Mazzocchi] described the danger, Silkwood became upset. She was bright, had had some college training, and had worked in a scientific laboratory with plutonium for two years; and no one at Kerr-McGee had ever told her the metal was carcinogenic. No one had ever taken an anatomical drawing, pointed to lungs or liver or lymph nodes or bones, said that plutonium can cause cancer there in twenty-five or thirty years. It angered her, for she had been in a contaminated room without a respirator just two months before." And so they made plans that day to have two atomic scientists from the University of Minnesota come speak to the Cimarron workers. Mazzocchi recalled how Silkwood took him aside at one point and said, "You know, there's some other problems that I'd like to talk to you about.": At the conclusion of the meeting, Mazzocchi and his staffer Steve Wodka counseled that the best hope for survival of the Cimarron workers and their local was to raise awareness about Kerr-McGee's practices with the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the national press.
To that end, the OCAW initiated an aggressive whistleblowing campaign. They claimed that "the Kerr-McGee plant had manufactured faulty fuel rods, falsified product inspection records, and risked employee safety". The union threatened litigation. On September 27, Silkwood testified to the AEC about having been contaminated with plutonium, and she alleged that safety standards had been relaxed because of a need to increase production. She appeared at the AEC hearings along with the two other committee members who likewise testified that Kerr-McGee was endangering its workers. The whistleblowing effort and the visibility it brought—combined with the educational sessions on plutonium toxicity that Silkwood arranged with the atomic scientists (attended by one hundred of her co-workers)—helped fight off decertification. The Cimarron local voted 80–61 in October to keep the OCAW as their bargaining agent.
On November 5, 1974, Silkwood performed a routine self-check that showed 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 leaks or perforations according to tests performed subsequently by Kerr-McGee personnel. This suggests the contamination had come not from inside the glovebox, but from some other source.
The next morning, as she left for a union meeting, Silkwood again tested positive for plutonium, although she had performed only paperwork tasks that morning. She was given a more intensive decontamination. On November 7, as she entered the plant, she was found to be severely 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 Sherri Ellis were sent to Los Alamos National Laboratory for in-depth testing to determine the amount of plutonium in their bodies.
There were questions about how Silkwood became contaminated during this three-day period from November 5-7. 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 fact that the samples she collected at home had extremely high levels of plutonium, while the samples collected in "fresh" jars at the plant and at Los Alamos showed much lower levels.
Silkwood concluded that someone working for Kerr-McGee Corp. had deliberately contaminated her, whereas its management alleged that she had contaminated herself in order to tarnish the company's reputation. According to Richard Rashke's book The Killing of Karen Silkwood, the particular type of plutonium found in Silkwood's home came from a Cimarron production area, pellet lot 29, where she did not work. Starting in August, the pellet lot 29 samples were kept in a Kerr-McGee vault to which she had no access.
Death By November, Silkwood believed she had assembled sufficient documentation, including company papers, to corroborate her claims against Kerr-McGee. She decided to go public with this evidence and contacted David Burnham, a New York Times journalist whom Tony Mazzocchi referred her to. Burnham had previously broken the Frank Serpico police corruption case and was now researching atomic energy issues.
On November 13, 1974, Silkwood attended a 5:30 p.m. union meeting, along with ten other members of the OCAW local, at the Hub Cafe in Crescent. She made a brief presentation and sipped iced tea. Another attendee at the meeting, Wanda Jean Jung, stated in a sworn affidavit in January 1975 that Silkwood had a folder, a spiral notebook, and a packet of documents with her at the cafe. During a break in the meeting, Jung said she spoke with Silkwood who was crying quietly and admitted how frightened she was "that she had been so badly contaminated, she would eventually get cancer and die from the plutonium in her lungs." But then, Jung stated in her affidavit, Karen pointed to her documents and said, "there was one thing she was glad about ... that she had all the proof concerning falsification of records. As she said this, she clenched her hand more firmly on the folder and notebook she was holding. She told me she was on her way to meet Steve Wodka and a New York Times reporter ... to give them this material."
At 7:10 p.m., Silkwood left the meeting, got into her 1973 white Honda Civic and drove alone toward Oklahoma City, about away, to meet with Burnham and Wodka. Less than 30 minutes later, Silkwood's body was discovered in her smashed-up car, 7.3 miles from the cafe. The car had run off the left side of State Highway 74, traveled some distance along the grass shoulder, and then struck the wing wall of a concrete culvert 0.11 miles (180 m) south of the intersection with West Industrial Road (). The impact from hitting the wall caused her to be impaled by her steering wheel and pinned to the roof of the Honda Civic. She was pronounced dead at the scene.
Silkwood's car contained none of the documents she had been holding in the meeting at the Hub Cafe. The Oklahoma state trooper at the crash site remembers that he found one or two tablets of the sedative methaqualone (Quaalude) in the car, and what he believed were two marijuana joints. The coroner found 0.35 milligrams of methaqualone in her blood—"a therapeutic dose is .25 mg, a toxic dose, .50 mg." The Oklahoma Highway Patrol report concluded that she fell asleep at the wheel and died as a result of an accident.