Karen Silkwood was 28 when she died on a dark stretch of Oklahoma State Highway 74 on the evening of November 13, 1974. She was a laboratory technician at the Kerr-McGee plutonium plant near Crescent, an outspoken member of her union, and she was on her way to Oklahoma City to meet a union official and a reporter from The New York Times. Witnesses said she carried a folder of documents. Her small Honda was found wrecked against a concrete culvert, and no folder was ever found. Half a century later, the questions of how plutonium got into her body and home, and whether the crash was an accident, still have no settled answer.
The plant and the union
Kerr-McGee’s Cimarron facility, on the river of that name in Logan County, fabricated plutonium fuel pins for nuclear reactors. Silkwood joined in 1972 and became active in the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers union, which was fighting a drive to decertify it. In August 1974 the local chose her as one of its three bargaining-committee members, a post no woman at the plant had held before, and she took charge of health and safety. In late September she and two colleagues went to Washington, where they met union leaders and told the Atomic Energy Commission about worker exposures, sloppy procedures and, they alleged, doctored inspection records for fuel rods. The union asked her to gather documentation.
The contamination
Over three days that November, Silkwood was repeatedly found to be contaminated with plutonium. On November 5, after working at a glove box, monitors picked it up on her skin, in her hair and inside her nose. She was cleaned, but the next day she was contaminated again after doing only paperwork. On November 7 her urine and stool samples showed high levels, and a company team that went to her apartment found plutonium in the bathroom, the kitchen and her bedroom, with traces even in the refrigerator. Much of what she owned had to be destroyed. She was flown to the Los Alamos laboratory for testing and came back to work on November 13.
How the contamination happened has never been established. The company suggested she had taken plutonium home herself to embarrass it; her supporters suspected someone had deliberately poisoned her. Neither claim has been proved.
The crash
That evening Silkwood attended a union meeting at a cafe in Crescent and left alone shortly after seven. Within half an hour her car was found about seven miles south of town. It had drifted across to the left side of the road, run along the shoulder and hit the wing wall of a culvert. The Oklahoma Highway Patrol concluded she had fallen asleep at the wheel; the medical examiner found the sedative methaqualone in her blood at a level above a normal therapeutic dose. The union hired an accident investigator, A. O. Pipkin, who reported fresh dents on the rear fender and bumper and argued that another car had struck her from behind. Skeptics pointed to more ordinary causes for that damage: Silkwood had backed into a ditch two weeks earlier, and the wreck was handled by a tow crew. That conclusion, combined with the missing papers, turned an apparent traffic death into a national story. The FBI investigated, and the Justice Department concluded the crash was an accident.
The verdict
Silkwood’s father sued Kerr-McGee on behalf of her estate, but only over the contamination; the court did not try the crash. In 1979 a federal jury in Oklahoma City awarded $505,000 in actual damages and $10 million in punitive damages, and specifically rejected the company’s claim that she had removed the plutonium herself. The plant had already closed in 1975. An appeals court cut the award to $5,000, but in January 1984 the U.S. Supreme Court, splitting five to four, ruled that federal regulation of nuclear plants did not prevent a state-law punitive award and sent the case back. In 1986 the company settled for $1.38 million without admitting liability. The case became a landmark in nuclear and workplace law, and Mike Nichols’s 1983 film Silkwood, with Meryl Streep, made her a symbol of corporate whistleblowing.
Where it stands
Writers on both sides have made strong cases. Richard Rashke’s 1981 book treated her death as a killing and an official cover-up. In a 1982 review, the journalist John M. Crewdson argued that the investigations behind such accounts had not shown foul play. The documented facts are narrower: Silkwood was contaminated with plutonium from her employer’s plant by means no one has explained, a jury held the company liable, and she died in a single-car crash that the authorities ruled accidental and her union believed was not. The folder, if it existed, has never surfaced.