Mike Boettcher

Still, even after the plant closed, Kermagee continued to operate as an energy company for more than 30 years. After it was acquired, Kermagee and its new parent company agreed to pay a $5 billion settlement with the Department of Justice to clean up contaminated sites from its oil, gas, and chemical operations across the country. This included radioactive waste from the plant where Karen worked.

At the time, in 2014, the DOJ called it, quote, the largest payment for the cleanup of environmental contamination in history. Kermagee wasn't the only company that ultimately abandoned its nuclear investments. That big vision the US government had for this bountiful plutonium economy, one that supplied this evergreen source of cheap energy, well, that dream started to tarnish.

By the late 1970s, there were these big questions about the safety of nuclear power plants and what to do with radioactive waste. And those questions cooled the plutonium economy. Over time, the construction of new nuclear reactors in the U.S. slowed to a trickle.

How would Karen have felt about this shift away from nuclear power and her role in that shift? I wonder what she'd think of this new interest we're seeing in nuclear energy today. All of those big tech companies need sources of energy to fuel their hungry servers, especially with AI on the rise.

Companies like Microsoft, Amazon, and Google are all making serious investments into nuclear power in search of an emission-free source of electricity. the industry that Karen blew the whistle on could very well be on the brink of a comeback.

Throughout our reporting, we asked the people we spoke with what Karen meant to them, why her story still resonates 50 years after her death. We collected what they told us, along with bits of archival tape that spoke to Karen's legacy.

She was an ordinary person like you and I. She seen something there that had to be done, and she did it for the union.

A good woman with a good heart. So we're going to pause our investigation into the death of Karen Silkwood here. We don't have any more episodes planned, but I say pause because Bob and I have been working on this story for years, and I can't quite imagine not working on it.

Radioactive, the Karen Silkwood Mystery, is a production of ABC Audio in collaboration with Standing Bear Entertainment. I'm Mike Boettcher. My co-host Bob Sands and I served as consulting producers on this podcast along with Brent Donis. Thanks to the ABC News investigative unit and investigative producer Jenny Wagnon-Kortz, chief investigative reporter Josh Margolin,

reporter-producer Sasha Pesnik, and associate producer Alexandra Myers. This podcast was written and produced by senior producer Nancy Rosenbaum and Vika Aronson. Tracy Samuelson was our story editor, associate producer and fact-checker Audrey Mostek. We had production help from Meg Fierro, story consultant Chris Donovan, Supervising producer, Sasha Aslanian. Original music by Soundboard.

Thanks to Pat and Texla Mountain for the use of their song, Karen Silkwood. Mixing by Rick Kwan. Ariel Chester is our social media producer. Special thanks to Liz Alessi, Katie Dendoss, Cindy Galley, and the University of Oklahoma's Gaylord College of Journalism. Josh Cohan is ABC Audio's Director of Podcast Programming. Laura Mayer is our Executive Producer.

Okay, we got the whole fam family. Steve's an accident reconstructionist. He's used to speaking to juries in courtrooms. He's dressed the part today in a light gray suit coat and tie. Anyway, I just feel better knowing who I'm talking to.

Why did Karen's car leave the road that night and crash into a concrete culvert?

Or did another vehicle try to scare her or run her off the road? We were pretty late in the reporting process for this podcast when we tracked down the bumper of Karen's Honda Civic. And that set this whole accident reconstruction idea in motion.

We scrambled to find someone who could do the work, and ABC News hired Steve Irwin and his team to review all the evidence we could pull together for them.

In this episode, what we learned, how it sits with the family, and where we go from here. From ABC Audio, this is Radioactive, The Karen Silkwood Mystery. Episode 5, The Phantom Vehicle. Our last episode. I'm Mike Boettcher. And I'm Bob Sands. This Zoom call, it's pretty strange when you think about it.

50 years after Karen's death, her three adult children, her two sisters, even one of her granddaughters who never got to meet her, can beam in and watch a guy run computer models simulating the path her car took that night, its velocity, angle, and final moment of impact.

They watch this little digital version of her car smash into a wall on a loop, as if it's backing up and hitting the wall once, twice, three times.

Steve's been in the business for 37 years. He actually worked with A.O. Pipkin back in the 80s, and Pipkin was an important person in Steve's life.

Steve's long-ago work with Pipkin meant something to Pipkin's daughter, Karen Pipkin Guerrero, too. You met her in the last episode when we drove to her home in Albuquerque to see the bumper.