Poisoned by Plutonium

Was Karen Silkwood a willing or innocent nuclear victim ?

The car had careened off a country road in Oklahoma and crumpled against a culvert. Its sole occupant lay dead, surrounded by a litter of papers she had been carrying. Karen Silkwood, 28, a lab technician in a plant producing fuel rods for nuclear reactors, had been driving to meet a New York Times reporter. She hoped to document her charges that officials at the installation, owned by the Kerr-McGee Corp., had continually and carelessly exposed their employees to one of the world's most dangerous metals: plutonium. But after the car was towed from the ditch, the papers could not be found.

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 aim, as its lawyer put it, is "to stop this conduct by that industry forever."

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. It may not explain why police officials first dispatched their tow-truck operator to the wreckage and then called him back, or why Kerr-McGee personnel were at the scene within minutes, or where the documents went.

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, a scientist who has done pioneering work with plutonium, testified that Silkwood's lungs had contained almost twice as much of the dangerous metal as the amount that can induce cancer. "Anyone exposed to that amount of plutonium is married to lung cancer," he said. "It is then an inevitable process."

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.

In its defense, Kerr-McGee argued that it had observed safety rules, but that

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.

In turn, the family will produce witnesses who will contend that Silkwood had been too horrified by the contamination to have possibly caused it herself. The family concedes that it cannot prove who planted the poison, but suggests that someone was out to scare Silkwood--and had certainly succeeded. The Silkwood lawyers will also try to turn Kerr-McGee's argument against itself. If Silkwood could have slipped lethal quantities of plutonium out of the plant, they will ask the jury, does not that mean that any employee could do so? And would not that prove that the "highest due care" as specified in the negligence statutes, had not been exercised?

The family intends to show that the papers Silkwood was carrying on the night of her death would have demonstrated the company's carelessness. Lawyer Gerald Spence claimed in court that Silkwood wanted to "tell the public" that a startling 40 Ibs. of plutonium was missing from the plant. Spence also said she had X rays of fuel rods that had been retouched by the company to conceal faulty seals. Her point: a defective rod could cause a catastrophic accident. The family also intends to call former company employees, including a plant manager, to testify to these and other mishandlings of the fuel. The witnesses are expected to tell, for example, of the night that workers were dispatched by the company to retrieve dead fish from the nearby Cimarron River in an unsuccessful attempt to conceal the dumping of radioactive wastes into the stream.

Ironically, the Kerr-McGee plant now under legal attack no longer exists:

it was closed in 1976, 14 months after Silkwood's death, when Westinghouse, which had been buying its fuel rods, complained of their poor quality and refused to re new its contract. Nevertheless, the entire nuclear power industry, increasingly embroiled in controversy over its handling of radioactive materials, is watching the suit closely. If the judge and jury accept the claims of the company's liability made by the Silkwood lawyers, the case could force the industry to make drastic and costly revisions in its process of producing the highly radioactive metal that is used in breeder reactors. --

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