Karen Silkwood

Karen Gay Silkwood was a 28-year-old chemical technician and union activist at the Kerr-McGee Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site, a nuclear fuel processing plant near Crescent, Oklahoma. She had become increasingly concerned about safety violations at the plant, including allegations of falsified quality control records for plutonium fuel rods being manufactured for the Breeder Reactor demonstration project.

As a member of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International Union, Silkwood had been gathering evidence of these violations. In early November 1974, she was found to be contaminated with plutonium—levels high enough that her apartment had to be decontaminated. The source of the contamination was never definitively determined, though Kerr-McGee implied she had contaminated herself to embarrass the company.

On the evening of November 13, 1974, Silkwood left a union meeting at a Hub Cap Cafe in Crescent, reportedly carrying a manila folder and a large notebook containing documents about safety violations. She was driving to meet David Burnham, a New York Times reporter, and Steve Wodka, an official from her union. Her car was found crashed into a concrete culvert on Highway 74. She was dead. The documents were not in the car.

The official ruling was that Silkwood fell asleep at the wheel. However, an independent investigation found dents on the rear of her car consistent with being struck by another vehicle, and a private investigator found traces of methaqualone in her system that he believed were insufficient to cause her to fall asleep. Kerr-McGee settled a lawsuit by Silkwood's estate in 1986 for $1.38 million. The case inspired the 1983 film 'Silkwood' starring Meryl Streep. Whether Karen Silkwood was murdered to prevent her from exposing nuclear safety violations has never been definitively answered.