Karen Silkwood worked for Kerr-McGee, an oil and gas behemoth that was expanding into the nuclear power industry. Escalating production quotas lead to more accidents at the plant, and Karen quietly travels to Washington DC to report concerns about worker safety to her union and to regulators. Before leaving, she volunteers for a risky assignment. Follow "Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery" now on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Amazon Music, or your podcast app of choice. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices
Chapter 1: What happened at the Kerr-McGee Plutonium Facility?
We've gotten special permission to be here today, and we've invited Karen Silkwood's son, Michael, to join us. This is the door your mom would have walked through going to work every day. Right.
And we have alarms going off.
They know we're here. Hope it's not a radioactive detector.
All right, I'm getting the cobwebs.
There are literally thick cobwebs that look like Halloween decorations. So much about this place feels haunted.
The three of us are here on a kind of pilgrimage. We have a lot of unanswered questions about what happened to Karen Silkwood. This site represents the last chapter of her life. So we've come here to see where that chapter started.
There's not much left here in this stripped-down husk of a building. Most of the equipment and furniture's been taken out. So it makes it kind of hard to imagine what it would have looked like when Karen worked here, when she and her coworkers walked these hallways in white jumpsuits. They were here to process radioactive plutonium and uranium to make fuel rods to power a nuclear reactor. Wow.
You know something? This is really spooky.
It gets a little spookier back in here.
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Chapter 2: Who was Karen Silkwood and what was her role?
She was a scientist at heart. So, you know, she had left college, married my father. She probably was like, hey, I'm getting to get back into a scientific field, which is something that she really excelled at and wanted to be a part of.
Maybe this could get her back on track, a fresh start after her divorce and having to leave her kids behind.
The job was at a nuclear fuel processing plant that was owned by the Kerr-McGee Corporation. They were a huge oil and gas company that had been making a big push into nuclear power. Here's a clip from the Oklahoma Historical Society.
Kerr-McGee refers to itself today as a natural resources company, for in addition to petroleum... It is deeply involved in gas and coal and is one of the nation's largest producers of nuclear energy.
Kerr-McGee no longer exists. It was acquired by another oil company for more than $16 billion back in 2006.
But in the early 1970s, Kerr-McGee was a really big deal. It was a Fortune 500 company with nearly 10,000 employees. And its power and reach ran deep, real deep, especially here in Oklahoma, where we have streets named after its namesakes.
One of the company's founders, Robert S. Kerr, was governor of Oklahoma in the 1940s and then became a U.S. senator.
So the company had real pull in D.C. and the corridors of power on Capitol Hill.
Kerr-McGee drilled for oil, they refined it, and then they sold the end products at their filling stations.
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Chapter 3: What were the working conditions like at Kerr-McGee?
Continual leaks, just one right after the other. Furnace leaks over in the powder plant, valve leaks, pipe leaks, tank leaks. You might say towards the end it was just one big leak. basically.
AEC records would eventually show that over 70 workers had been exposed to airborne plutonium. Steve Wodka says the union knew Kerr-McGee had a shoddy track record when it came to safe working conditions. Profit was number one.
And if you run a safe plant, if you really take the precautions, it cuts into profit.
Don Gummo remembers this one day when he got hurt in the lab. He was working in something called a glove box. It was this sealed, see-through box with thick rubber gloves attached to it so workers could put their hands in the gloves and handle plutonium inside the box without having to actually come into direct contact with it. It was supposed to keep them safe.
On this day, Don was using a hot plate to dissolve some fuel pellets and was using this nitric acid solution he'd poured inside a glass flask. Really nasty stuff. It was a bright, angry red color. Don's bosses had taught him a shortcut to speed up the process. By putting a stopper in the flask, it increased the pressure so the solution would heat up faster. Then Karen popped into the lab.
Karen stuck her head in and said, Hey, Gummy, it's lunchtime. Give me two, he told her. After his lunch break, he started heating up the flask again. But then there was a problem.
But what had happened is while the hot plate was unplugged, it was cooling off, so those stoppers that were pushed into the top got sucked in even tighter. But when I picked one up and I was going to set them off the hot plate and let them cool, and it blew up. It just shattered into a million pieces. And that hot nitric acid, from my point of view, is coming right in my face.
The steaming acid was actually all contained in the sealed glove box, but his reflexes kicked in in a big way. He fell backwards and cracked his head on the floor.
Karen was working in the lab next door.
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Chapter 4: How did the union fight for workers' rights?
If it's hot, it's contaminated. Jim Smith, the supervisor who talked about how the plutonium plant was one big leak, he says that plant workers even had their own lingo to talk about how hot or contaminated something was.
One guy might say hotter than hell, and the next guy say it's just screaming meme-y and... which means when you put the Geiger counter down there, it counts so fast, all it does is scream. It doesn't go click, click, click. In other words, it's so grossly contaminated, even the Geiger counter can't count it. They say it's a screaming Mimi.
That means the Geiger counter just goes zing, and that's it. When you get up there, millions of disintegrations per minute. Well, that's getting up there.
These sometimes sloppy conditions at the plant, the long shifts and the pressure to work harder and faster, Karen now saw that her friends were getting hurt in the process. All of this was taking a toll. She wasn't sleeping well, especially after working an overnight shift.
Plus, her personal life wasn't going great either. She and her boyfriend, Drew Stevens, who also worked at the plant, they'd split up, and by this point, Karen had moved in with a roommate.
She was depressed and decided to get some help. Here's author Richard Rasky again.
She went to a doctor. She couldn't sleep. Part of the reason she couldn't sleep is working 12 hours and sometimes doing double shifts and all the pressure she was under. And so he prescribed Quilutes. And she became dependent on them.
Quaaludes are a tranquilizer, and they were commonly prescribed for insomnia back in Karen's day. Her boyfriend would later say that Karen started using Quaaludes to calm her nerves, and the fact that Karen took them and other drugs would later be used to discredit her and say she was driving under the influence the night she died.
But we're getting ahead of ourselves, because before all that, the safety concerns that Karen had would hit a lot closer to home.
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Chapter 5: What incidents highlighted safety concerns at the plant?
And you shared those same concerns.
Yes, absolutely.
And what was it about the safety that had you concerned?
Contaminations. Yes. I mean, you had contamination get out of the control, basically, in a room. And you went into full-face respirators. We'd work maybe with a full-face respirator 10, 12 hours a day, maybe even longer than that, in respirators, which is hard.
Working with a respirator is something Don Gummo remembers, too.
It was a full-faced respirator, and it had a canister. And then, of course, we had to wear a hood underneath the mask. It was a miserable way to spend a shift.
After the 1972 strike, workers had returned to the job under Kerr-McGee's terms, a big blow for the union. It lost a lot of members, but Karen hung on.
Then in the fall of 1974, more than a third of the union members at the plant signed a petition requesting to get rid of the union. If enough workers didn't vote to keep the union, it'd be kicked out of the plant. No more collective bargaining.
The OCAW wanted to be fighting with Kerr-McGee for safer working conditions, but first it had to fight for its own survival, to convince workers that they were better off having the union represent them.
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Chapter 6: What is the significance of airborne plutonium?
At the end of September 1974, Karen arrived at the OCAW's Washington DC offices.
One of the people Karen met on that trip was Steve Wodka. We heard from him earlier in the episode. Back then, Steve was a 25-year-old legislative staffer with the OCAW. Karen and the other union leaders told Steve and his bosses that they'd been keeping track of contamination incidents at the plant, like the diaper incident Gummo described. Incidents where workers had been exposed to radiation.
So Steve and his bosses arranged a meeting with the Atomic Energy Commission the next day.
Because the company's handling of plutonium were governed by the Atomic Energy Commission. This agency had regulations. It had the power to take...
Carnegie's license away. But here's the thing. Ever since the company got a license to process plutonium in 1970, some workers and union members felt the AEC hadn't done much to hold Carnegie accountable. For instance, they claimed whenever the AEC sent inspectors to visit the plant, management usually knew about it in advance.
So part of the whole issue was not only was the company doing bad things, but that the Atomic Energy Commission itself hadn't been enforcing the law, hadn't been protecting the workers. And this was the problem. with the Atomic Energy Commission in that they had not come down on this company, even though it was clear that this company was routinely violating the conditions of its license.
You have to understand, there were all these contamination incidents at the plant leading up through to 1974. Kerbegee was never fined a dollar.
by the AEC. The agency also said that Kermagee was subject to both scheduled and unscheduled inspections.
When the AEC investigated a report in 1973 that some nuclear material had leaked at the plant, it gave Kermagee a clean bill of health, saying the leak hadn't been a big deal. Kerr-McGee officials used the same script when stuff like this came up, telling the AEC they'd cleaned up the problem.
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Chapter 7: How did Kerr-McGee's practices impact workers?
But before Karen and the others headed back to Oklahoma, they huddled with Steve and his boss to make a game plan around their bigger, more serious allegation that Kerr-McGee was fudging inspection reports. They needed evidence. But how? We're all sitting there. And she says, I'll do it. Karen said she'd poke around the plant and see what she could find to document their claims.
Before she left, Steve warned her to keep a low profile. He didn't want anyone to know what she was doing.
We were concerned that she was going to get fired. That was the worst thing that we thought could possibly happen. That was about the limit. That was where we were wrong.
If she could deliver solid evidence, the plan was to bring that evidence to an investigative reporter.
A big national front page story could force the company to address these problems and give the union some serious leverage in negotiating a better contract.
We wanted to see what we could do to bring maximum pressure on them in order so that the local can get a decent contract.
That maximum pressure would come if this bombshell story landed in the New York Times, a story that would show the entire world that this company had been making a defective, possibly even dangerous product.
Once Karen got back to Oklahoma, she dedicated herself to this new mission. She started taking notes in a small, spiral-bound pad she kept hidden in her pocket. Suddenly, she was a super snoop. It was up to her to get the goods.
She made the turn from being an activist to becoming a spy.
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Chapter 8: What were the consequences of Karen's activism?
No, no, no, hold on, hold on, hold on. What I'm trying to tell you, what I found out when I was in Minnesota about plutonium getting into your lung and these particles getting into your lung. Well, when these two doctors, when you guys meet up with these two doctors, these doctors are going to flip out when they hear the stories you have to tell.
Steve was referring to the scientists from the University of Minnesota he was bringing to meet with workers from the plant a few days later to teach them about the dangers of plutonium, including cancer.
So Karen finishes her story about her friend Jean, who had been crying because she was afraid she'd been contaminated. A health safety officer had apparently told Jean she didn't have anything to worry about.
And more than likely, though, it all came out a nasal smear. This is what he told her. She stood there a minute and she says, but you don't know that. She said, I could have gotten some of that down into my lung. It's steamy going on every day, so it accumulates, doesn't it?
Sure as hell does.
If you breathe it once a week, for every week for five years that you're out there, you're going to have something.
But the whole point is, is that Plutonium is so carcinogenic, is so potent, that it's now figured that, you know, under the conditions that you work under in that kind of a plant, you don't have to work there for five years. You might only have to work there for one friggin' month, and you've got enough of a body burden to cause cancer.
Oh, Dave, don't tell me that.
Well, yes, I'm going to tell you that, because I told you. If the union loses this election, I tell you, Karen, you better get the out of there. I'll be gone.
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