Mike Boettcher

What it comes down to, Steve explained, is that Karen lost control of the car. but we still don't know why.

Karen Silkwood's son, Michael Meadows, shared what I think a lot of us were feeling, this mix of gratitude, appreciation, but also some disappointment.

There was a chorus of thank yous and goodbyes.

We were hoping Steve Irwin, with his analysis of the bumper and all the other evidence, would solve the mystery.

I think it's fair to say that's what Karen's family was hoping for, too. Confirmation of a second car or, at the very least, some definitive answer to why her Honda Civic left the road and crashed into a concrete wall as she was driving to what was arguably one of the most important meetings of her life.

It turns out that while technology can do a lot of remarkable things, at least in this case, firm answers weren't part of the deal. At least, not yet.

The day after our session with Steve, one of our producers got a text from Karen Silkwood's older daughter, Christy Riddles. Christy was eight when her mom died. She was the oldest of the three kids and the one with the most memories of her mom. Christy was the one on the Zoom call who asked if Steve could pinpoint why Karen lost control of her car the night she died.

Unfortunately, Steve couldn't give her that piece of the puzzle.

Karen Silkwood did play a role in raising awareness about the risks and dangers of nuclear power.

About a month before she died, Karen told the union leader, Steve Watka, that she was going to be gone from Kermagee, and that she was going to shut things down before she left.

One of those workers was Jim Smith. He'd been a manager at the plutonium plant from day one. He told some documentary film producers that before everything closed down, there'd been talk of Kerr-McGee re-upping their fuel rod contract. But that would have required a major cleanup effort.

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 U.S. 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.

And that's not what you got back in the early and mid-1970s.

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.