Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee

Date: Silkwood died on November 13, 1974

Identification: An employee of the Kerr-McGee plutonium fuel-rod processing plant, Karen Silkwood was a union activist who gained notoriety after she died under mysterious circumstances while actively engaged in a campaign to publicize serious worker safety violations in her employer’s plant near Crescent, Oklahoma.

Significance: Silkwood’s dramatic and unexplained death, which was apparently connected to the safety hazards she was investigating, drew national attention to dangers in the nuclear power industry. Investigations established that Kerr-McGee had committed serious safety infractions that contributed to Silkwood’s poor health and possibly even her death.

A divorced mother of three, Karen Silkwood (1946-1974) began working at the Kerr-McGee Corporation’s new nuclear reactor fuel-rod processing plant near Crescent, Oklahoma, in August, 1972. There, she helped to produce plutonium pellets. Among the tasks she performed in the plant’s metallography laboratory were quality-control checks on plutonium pellets that she held up to unexposed X-ray film. Pellets in which plutonium was distributed evenly throughout produced no “hot spots” on the film and passed the quality-control checks. Silkwood also polished fuel-rod welds to check for cracks and inclusions.

As an employee of the Kerr-McGee plant, Silkwood belonged to the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union (OCAW). In November, 1972, only a few months after she had been hired, her union’s contract with Kerr-McGee expired. The local union branch then went on strike, demanding higher wages and improved training and health and safety programs. After ten weeks, the strike ended when Kerr-McGee issued a sign-or-be-fired ultimatum. Meanwhile, the strike had strengthened Silkwood’s bonds to her union, and she was developing concerns regarding worker safety in her plant.

The Trouble Begins

During the spring of 1974, Kerr-McGee fell so far behind in production that it initiated twelve-hour shifts and seven-day workweeks to catch up. The accelerated work pace caused a dramatic increase in accidental contaminations and spills, and Silkwood’s worries about worker safety heightened. On July 31, 1974, Silkwood herself was accidentally contaminated while working in the emission spectroscopy lab. Tests using Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) standards showed a slight air-filter contamination in the lab. However, results of the test seemed confusing because the contamination occurred only on Silkwood’s shift, not on the shifts before or after hers.

In August, 1974, Silkwood was elected to the local union’s bargaining committee and assigned to address the topics of health and safety for the impending contract negotiations. Taking her new responsibilities seriously, she began studying work conditions at Kerr-McGee carefully. In September, she and two other local union officials met with officials of the national union and the AEC to discuss evidence of the dangerous conditions in the plant that she had observed. She also revealed her suspicions that company officials were altering the plant’s quality-control records to make sure production levels remained high. She specifically faulted Kerr-McGee for falsifying inspection records to hide the improper handling of fuel rods and the improper assignment of poorly trained workers to perform tasks during a production speedup. If her charges could be proven to be true, Kerr-McGee would have been found to be guilty of fraud. Silkwood was then advised to gather more documentation at the plant secretly. At that same meeting, she learned for the first time that plutonium is carcinogenic.

Silkwood’s Contamination

Several months later, Silkwood discovered that she herself had become contaminated with nearly forty times the legal limit for plutonium contamination. Curiously, the plutonium contamination did not seem to come from any holes in the protective gloves she had used and was greater on a day when she had only been doing office work and had no contact with nuclear materials. When she arrived for work on November 7, plant inspectors found Silkwood so dangerously contaminated that she was even exhaling contaminated air. A health team accompanied her to her home, where traces of plutonium were found in her bathroom, her refrigerator, and other places. Silkwood and her housemate were then sent to Los Alamos National Laboratory for more extensive examinations, and their house was thoroughly decontaminated.

The Forensic Mystery

The important question for forensic investigators to answer was how Silkwood could have become so seriously contaminated within such a short period. Silkwood herself charged that Kerr-McGee operatives were conducting a smear campaign to discredit her criticisms of safety conditions at their plant by putting plutonium in the urine and feces sample jars they gave her. That, she claimed, accounted for the plutonium contamination found in her bathroom that occurred when she spilled a urine sample there on the morning of November 7. She pointed out that samples taken at her home showed dramatically higher levels of contamination than those taken in “fresh” jars either at the Kerr-McGee plant or at Los Alamos.

Kerr-McGee responded by accusing Silkwood of deliberately contaminating herself in order to discredit the company. Making such an accusation was a dangerous strategy for the company to pursue, as it suggested that the company’s security procedures were so lax that employees could smuggle nuclear material out of the plant. To complicate the issue, forensic investigators later determined that the soluble plutonium to which Silkwood had been exposed was not the same kind to which she could have had any kind of access in the plant for several months. The plant stored the type of plutonium with which she had been contaminated in a vault to which only Kerr-McGee managers had access.

Silkwood’s Death

At the time Silkwood was contaminated by plutonium, Silkwood claimed to have assembled a large file of documents that supported her charges of irregularities in the Kerr-McGee plant. She was scheduled to meet with a New York Times reporter and a national union official to publicize her findings. On November 13, 1974, she showed a binder and packet of documents to attendees at a union meeting in Crescent, Oklahoma. Afterward, she left the meeting alone, intending to drive to Oklahoma City, thirty miles away, to present the documents to the Times reporter and union official.

Silkwood never reached Oklahoma City. Later that evening, her dead body was found in her car, which had apparently run off the road and hit a culvert. police on the scene concluded that her death resulted from a single-car crash caused by her falling asleep at the wheel. They claimed to find no glass or debris to indicate that any other vehicles were involved. They also claimed to find some methaqualone (quaaludes) and marijuana in Silkwood’s car, but none of the documents she was believed to be carrying. A coroner found enough traces of methaqualone in her blood to cause her to become drowsy.

Despite a lack of hard evidence, many people believed that Silkwood was murdered to keep her from publicizing her charges against Kerr-McGee. Independent investigators argued that another vehicle could have forced her car off the road without leaving any evidence of its involvement in the accident. They also dispute the suggestion that Silkwood was asleep at the time of the accident by pointing out that the position in which her steering wheel was bent indicated that she must have been awake and alert, trying to control her car.

Investigation and Trial

Both the AEC and the Oklahoma state medical examiner requested that the Los Alamos Tissue Analysis Program examine Silkwood’s internal organs. Medical examiners found extensive plutonium contamination, with the greatest damage in her lungs and smaller amounts in her gastrointestinal organs. Such contamination was not consistent with the type of exposure to plutonium that Silkwood would have had during her normal tasks in the Kerr-McGee plant.

In November, 1976, Silkwood’s father and children filed a wrongful-death civil suit against Kerr-McGee, seeking $160,000 in damages. The suit charged the corporation with negligence in handling plutonium and both Kerr-McGee and the FBI with a conspiracy to deprive Silkwood of her civil rights. Throughout the legal proceedings’ discovery period, the Silkwood family’s attorneys were impeded by insufficient funds and a lack of cooperation from the defendants. They dropped the conspiracy charges before the suit went to trial and shifted their focus to proving negligence. The plaintiffs also amended their complaint to $1.5 million in compensatory damages and $10 million in punitive damages.

The Silkwood case, through which the family sought to improve safety in the nuclear industry and to educate the public on the dangers of nuclear energy, was not only a civil trial but also a social movement. Under the direction of attorney Gerald Spence, the Silkwood legal team sought to prove several issues: that plutonium was ultrahazardous and that Kerr-McGee was responsible for its proper care, that Karen Silkwood had been contaminated with plutonium that originated at Kerr-McGee, that she had not contaminated herself, that her contamination injured her between November 5 and 13, 1974, and that Kerr-McGee was negligent in failing to protect its workers. The trial did not cover the details of Silkwood’s death.

The trial began in March, 1979, and lasted ten weeks. The plaintiffs called nineteen witnesses to testify on the dangers of plutonium, working conditions at Kerr-McGee, and Karen Silkwood’s character. The defense team called twenty-four witnesses to testify that Silkwood had deliberately contaminated herself with non-Kerr-McGee plutonium and that the contamination had not injured her. Moreover, the defense argued that her contamination fell under workers’ compensation laws.

In May, 1979, both sides rested. While meeting with the judge, Kerr-McGee conceded that Silkwood had, in fact, been contaminated by its own plutonium. The judge then set a precedent by defining plutonium as ultrahazardous. On May 18, 1979, after twenty-one hours of deliberation, the jury found Kerr-McGee negligent in an off-site contamination incident and awarded Silkwood’s estate $500,000 in compensatory damages, $5,000 in property damages, and $10 million in punitive damages.

Kerr-McGee appealed the verdict to the Tenth Circuit Court of Appeals, contending that the first trial had violated federal and state regulations and that the first judge had erred in declaring plutonium ultrahazardous. On December 11, 1981, the appellate court concurred and lowered the award to only the $5,000 in property damages. Silkwood’s team then appealed to the U.S. Supreme Court. On January 11, 1984, that Court ruled that victims of radiation injuries could sue nuclear power companies.

The Supreme Court’s decision severely limited the federal monopoly on nuclear power by placing companies under state tort laws that could hold companies liable for punitive damages for gross negligence. The decision not only vindicated Karen Silkwood but also stood as a victory for states, which were given some regulatory control of the nuclear industry. In an out-of-court settlement in August, 1986, the Silkwood case finally ended with a $1.38 million agreement. Kerr-McGee contended that it settled to avoid more costly litigation.

Bibliography

James, Stuart H., and Jon J. Nordby, eds. Forensic Science: An Introduction to Scientific and Investigative Techniques. 2d ed. Boca Raton, Fla.: CRC Press, 2005. Provides an excellent overview of the forensic sciences for general readers.

Kohn, Howard. “Malignant Giant.” Rolling Stone, June 11, 1992, 92-97. Includes excerpts from the March 27, 1975, article that sparked an anti-nuclear power movement in the United States. Also discusses the impact of the case on the magazine.

‗‗‗‗‗‗‗. Who Killed Karen Silkwood? New York: Summit Books, 1981. Early compilation of Rolling Stone articles covers the struggles of Silkwood’s family and supporters and theories about her death. Includes a discussion of the evidence against Kerr-McGee.

Raloff, Janet. “Silkwood: The Legal Fallout.” Science, February 4, 1984, 74-79. Discusses the importance of the U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the Silkwood case for state regulation of the nuclear industry.

Rashke, Richard. The Killing of Karen Silkwood: The Story Behind the Kerr-McGee Plutonium Case. 2d ed. Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2000. Provides a detailed look at the events surrounding Silkwood’s death and the first trial. Based on information drawn from extensive interviews and available sources. A preface and three short chapters explore what has been learned about Silkwood since the book’s initial publication.