Nuclear Power on Trial
There is a story that political reporters tell about Robert Kerr, the energy baron and U.S. senator who ran for president in 1952. He lost but he acted like he hadn’t, and he soon had people calling him the “uncrowned king of the Senate.” Almost all important legislation required his blessing. John Kennedy learned that the hard way in 1961 when Kerr single-handedly arranged the defeat of the young president’s prized Medicare bill.
Kerr was an Oklahoman and a big-business Democrat and he made no secret of his distaste for Kennedy’s liberal, Ivy League politics. So J.F.K.’s supporters were stunned a short while later when the president suddenly agreed to fly to Oklahoma to help Kerr cut a ribbon for a desolate stretch of highway in the Kiamichi Mountains.
Oklahoma’s governor at the time, Howard Edmondson, the only state official to defy Kerr and back Kennedy in the 1960 race, called the White House to make sure he’d heard right. “Why the hell is the president of the United States coming to Oklahoma for such a bush-league event?” Edmondson wanted to know.
Kennedy’s reply was to the point. “I’m coming to Oklahoma,” he explained, “to kiss Bob Kerr’s ass.”
Kerr died fifteen years ago, but his stature was such that even today little of consequence happens in Oklahoma without some similar concession to his ghost. Kerr’s influence lives on through his company, Kerr-McGee Corporation, an energy conglomerate that made him a multimillionaire, gave clout to his political aspirations and ranks as one of Fortune‘s top 200 companies, with assets of $1.2 billion in oil, uranium, potash, helium, coal and asphalt.
A big, hearty man, Kerr was devoted to being first at what he did. He was the first native-born Oklahoma governor, an ambition he set openly while still a struggling lawyer only a few years departed from the log cabin where he grew up. And though he failed to become the first president from Oklahoma, he was one of Washington’s all-time power mongers in terms of getting things done and making others do them.
Kerr’s oil company was the first to expand into uranium, and, thanks in part to the senator’s royal presence on Capitol Hill, it became a nuclear industry leader and the country’s number one uranium producer.
Unhappily for Kerr-McGee, the company is currently facing another, less inspiring “first.” It is expected to enter a federal courtroom in June as the first nuclear firm to go on trial for its safety and security record, a circumstance of extended implications. At issue is Kerr-McGee’s handling of deadly radioactive materials. At stake is the company’s prestige and profits and, more importantly, the nuclear industry’s already troubled image.
The trial of Kerr-McGee promises to give new and urgent prominence to a number of questions that have been recent fare for television talk shows and Washington lunches. Are energy companies telling us the truth about nuclear fission’s unpredictable ways? Has technology mastered the sinister dangers of plutonium, which can cause cancer and blow up cities with equal facility? Is it protected from thieves? Are we protected from it?
The plaintiffs in the case are the father and children of Karen Silkwood, a young lab analyst who died in a suspicious car crash in November 1974 during an investigation of health, safety and record-keeping problems at the Kerr-McGee plant where she worked. The lawsuit seeks a vindication for her unfinished investigation, accuses the company of being deliberately callous, sloppy and negligent in the way it operated, and asks for $2.5 million in damages.
Kerr-McGee denies the allegations, but the final decision will be left to a jury of twelve Oklahomans. Their verdict, no matter how narrowly the legal system defines it, could have a powerful impact on the credibility of the nuclear industry and on people’s faith in a nuclear future.
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