Karen Silkwood

Karen Gay Silkwood (February 19, 1946 – November 13, 1974) was an American chemical 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 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 body 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 the circumstances of which were never explained entirely.

Her family sued Kerr-McGee for the plutonium contamination.

The company settled out of court for US$1.38 million, while not admitting liability.

In 1965, she married William Meadows, an oil pipeline worker, with whom she had three children.

After the couple's bankruptcy due to Meadows' overspending and after Meadows' refusal to end an extramarital affair, Silkwood left him in 1972 and relocated to Oklahoma City, where she worked briefly as a hospital clerk.

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 participated with a strike at the plant.

After the strike ended, she was elected to the union's bargaining committee, the first woman to have such duties 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.

During the summer of 1974, Silkwood testified to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) about having been contaminated, alleging that safety standards had been relaxed because of an increase of production.

She was appearing with other union members.

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 left for 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.

There were questions about how Silkwood became contaminated during 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 said she had been contaminated at the plant.

Kerr-McGee's management said that Silkwood had contaminated herself in order to harm the company's reputation.

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.

Silkwood said she had assembled documentation for her claims, including company papers.

Her story was chronicled in Mike Nichols's 1983 Academy Award nominated movie Silkwood in which she was portrayed by Meryl Streep.

Karen Gay Silkwood was born in Longview, Texas, and raised in Nederland, Texas.

She had two sisters, Linda and Rosemary.

She attended Lamar University in Beaumont, Texas.