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Karen Silkwood was a $4-an-hour technician at Kerr-McGee Corp.'s Cimarron River plutonium plant about 30 miles north of Oklahoma City. The facility makes plutonium pellet fuel rods for the breeder reactor, a second-generation nuclear power plant now being developed. Silkwood was one of the most active members of local 5-283 of the Oil, Chemical and Atomic Workers Union. She was deeply concerned about how plutonium was handled. And with good reason. Inhalation or swallowing of a few specks of the radioactive element can result in cancer. Exposure to slightly greater quantities can cause...
Though Kerr-McGee installed safeguards to protect its employees from the hazards of plutonium, Silkwood was critical of the plant's health and safety procedures. Last September, in testimony before the AEC, she complained about unsafe working conditions. In early November, she became living proof of those dangers. On two consecutive days, as Silkwood was leaving work, sensitive plant monitors detected that she was slightly contaminated by radioactivity. She was promptly scrubbed clean. Later, she brought in urine and fecal samples; they proved to be radioactive. On a third day, the monitors clicked when she entered the plant...
Meantime, the AEC launched its own probe of working conditions at the plant. The commission's records showed that since Kerr-McGee started its plutonium operations in 1970, 17 safety lapses-in which 73 employees were contaminated-had been reported. The union produced a list of 39 additional allegations of sloppiness in plutonium handling. Then in mid-December, two new cases involving five persons were reported to the AEC; Kerr-McGee quickly denounced them as "contrived." Yet the incidents were serious enough to force the company to shut the plant for more than two weeks...
...previous U.S. gold rushes gone anything like the one that began last week, California would have been short of settlers and Poet Robert Service would never have written about the cremation of Sam McGee in the Klondike. Legally free as of Dec. 31 to buy bullion for the first time in 41 years, Americans greeted the opportunity with a veteran prospector's wariness of fool's gold. The caution seemed justified. By week's end, after three full days of trading in the yellow metal, gold's price stood at $174 per ounce on the bellwether...
...boot sized 9½B. The day President Eisenhower suffered his coronary thrombosis, Manchester, you can bet, knew what he had for breakfast: "beef bacon, pork sausages, fried mush, and flapjacks." Statistics tumble on the reader's head like the rich chaos from Fibber McGee's closet. Who else would know that the average height of American women increased ½ in. between 1945 and 1954 (from 5 ft. 3½ in. to 5 ft. 4 in.)? Or that they were "being impregnated," in Manchester's phrase once every seven seconds...