Word: silkwood
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Those bare facts seemed suspicious enough in 1974 to touch off a series of newspaper and magazine articles by investigative reporters. The Silkwood case was quickly embraced by environmentalists, nuclear energy foes, feminists and civil libertarians. They saw the Kerr-McGee facility near Crescent, Okla., as an ugly symbol of an industry seeking profits while endangering its employees and nearby communities. Last week, for the first time, the case moved into a public courtroom. Silkwood's family is seeking $11.5 million in damages from Kerr-McGee for exposing her to dangerous levels of plutonium. Its other...
Unfortunately for those who see the Silkwood saga as a puzzling mystery story, the current trial has been so narrowed that it may not answer some of the most perplexing questions of the case. It will not try to resolve whether Silkwood was so tranquilized by pills to calm a nervous stomach, as Oklahoma state police contend, that she ran off the left side of the highway. It will not decide whether, as a union investigation claims, the fresh marks on her car's rear bumper were evidence that she had been forced off the road...
Instead, the trial will center on a fact not in dispute: that Silkwood had been exposed to enough plutonium to make her fear that she might be dying. The courtroom clash will come over just how that contamination occurred and whether it meant that the plant was negligent in handling the potent metal, which is used in atomic weapons. Plutonium is considered some 20,000 times more deadly than the venom from a cobra if ingested, and even minute quantities can cause cancer years later. As testimony opened in a federal court in Oklahoma City last week, Dr. John Gofman...
Just nine days before her death, Silkwood told company officials she feared she had been contaminated. A check showed that her apartment in Crescent contained fragments of the metal in the bathroom, kitchen and in a bologna-and-cheese sandwich in her refrigerator...
...Silkwood had carried small amounts of plutonium out of the plant and had deliberately contaminated herself and her apartment. Why should she act so bizarrely? Defense Attorney William Paul argued last week that she was emotionally unstable and possibly had been affected by the use of tranquilizers. Paul said she had become deeply involved in a bitter fight between her union and the company, and charged that she had set out to prove that the plant was dangerous by making herself seriously ill. She was, he suggested, kinky...