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.
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." 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.":I said, "What are they?" She said, "I work in a quality-control lab, and I noticed the lab technician would use a felt pen on the X-ray to cover over that little thin line that showed a crack in the control rod welds." And she told me there was some fooling with the computer data, too. I said, "Look, Karen, if you could prove that, I think we could use it to beat the company and improve the conditions in that facility." 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.