Karen Silkwood Vs. Nuclear Power: The Courtroom Reaction
James Noel arrived at the Federal courthouse in Oklahoma City on March 19th bearing a handwritten log of his experiences at a plutonium factory thirty miles away. The datebook had been in a desk drawer in his home since he left his job at the plant in 1974. Lawyers for the estate of the late Karen Silkwood, a former factory employee, had asked Noel to submit it as evidence in a landmark $11.5 million lawsuit against the nuclear-fuel-plant owner, the Kerr-McGee Corporation of Oklahoma.
Now a high-school science teacher, the bearded, tawny-haired Noel took the witness stand. Before him were jury members and an assembly of lawyers, reporters and political activists, many of them from New York and Washington D.C., who had gathered for the initial stage of the trial to hear the plaintiff’s opening presentation. The questioning began, and soon turned to a diary entry on October 22nd, 1974, three weeks before Silkwood’s mysterious death.
“Karen called me on the phone,” Noel testified. “She told me she was conducting a secret investigation at the plant, and she mentioned three particular items.” The first two, as he explained it, involved alleged safety violations and the falsifying of quality-control records. The third item sent a current of surprise through the audience.
Silkwood, he said, had discovered that approximately forty pounds of plutonium were missing from Kerr-McGee’s inventory.
Plutonium is the key ingredient in nuclear weapons, and that amount, enough for four bombs, could command $10 million or more on the international black market. Noel’s testimony was the first sworn corroboration that the twenty-eight-year-old Silkwood knew of possible smuggling at the plant, and his datebook seemed to point to her former employer as the chief suspect in the “unsolved crimes” her death left behind.
Karen Silkwood trusted Kerr-McGee, the country’s largest uranium producer and a pioneer in the plutonium field, when she was hired as a lab technician in 1972. But her opinion changed slowly over the next two years. Although she was not a scientist, she felt the plant’s operation was unsafe and, at times, illegal. Leaky gaskets and other faulty equipment caused the 150 workers to breathe in plutonium dust, and in September 1974, when Silkwood learned that as little as one-millionth of a gram could lead to cancer, she decided to take action.
Silkwood confided in two of her union’s national officials, Tony Mazzocchi and Steve Wodka of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers International (OCAW), and, at their request, agreed to get documentation of the problems. It was a clandestine effort, and the information was supposed to end up on the front page of the New York Times.
A week before Silkwood was to meet with a Times reporter, microscopic traces of plutonium were sprinkled on the contents of her refrigerator. Silkwood ate the food, and shortly thereafter suffered from radiation poisoning and was briefly hospitalized. The incident left her visibly frightened; “I’m afraid I’m going to die,” she told friends, choking back tears. Nonetheless, she summoned her remaining nerve and proceeded with planning the Times rendezvous on November 13th, 1974.
She was on her way to deliver the results of her sleuthing — a russet-colored notebook and a manila folder reportedly filled with company documents — when her car veered off Highway 74 near Oklahoma City and hit a concrete culvert. The folder and notebook subsequently disappeared. Oklahoma police decided her death was an asleep-at-the-wheel accident, but a private investigator hired by the union found dents in the rear of her car that he attributed to a wheeled assailant.
In November 1976, after Justice Department and congressional inquiries foundered, Silkwood’s father filed a lawsuit in a final attempt to prove that his daughter was a victim of more than bad luck. Part of the suit, which accuses Kerr-McGee of civil-rights violations, has been severed from the case pending an appellate review. So the current trial is generally restricted to the bizarre contamination of her apartment. That part of the suit holds that Kerr-McGee, as legal custodian of the plutonium, is responsible for it leaving the plant and therefore the food contamination.
The primary issue in the trial is negligence. But antinuclear forces view the Oklahoma City courtroom as an epicenter of their fierce nationwide struggle.