Kerr-McGee

THE GIANT OKLAHOMA-based energy company's safety record became absorbed in national questions about nuclear energy after the mysterious death of laboratory analyst Karen Silkwood. However, the Cimarron River plutonium plant where Silkwood worked was not the only Kerr-McGee property where health and safety issues have been raised.

Although Kerr-McGee began as an oil drilling operation in the Oklahoma plains, its problems centered on Kerr-McGee Nuclear, a subsidiary corporation that processed uranium and plutonium for the federal government. Plutonium, like uranium, is used in nuclear bombs and nuclear power plants. Like all of the elements used for nuclear devices, plutonium emits alpha rays: radiation that, if absorbed in sufficient quantity, can cause cells in a seemingly healthy body to reproduce in a mutated form, ultimately resulting in cancer.

The Los Alamos National Laboratories call plutonium “a very dangerous radiological hazard” due to its high emission of alpha rays. Once plutonium enters the body, it can accumulate in the [Page 481]bones, lungs, and liver, where it continues to emit alpha rays long after the initial exposure.

The November 13, 1974, death of whistleblower Silkwood in a single-car accident as she drove to meet a New York Times reporter has spawned conspiracy theories that make it difficult to separate Kerr-McGee's actual misdeeds from plausible but unprovable notions of what might have happened. The facts that a jury accepted in 1979, awarding $10.5 million to Silkwood's heirs, were that Kerr-McGee's negligence in its safety procedures had caused Silkwood to become contaminated with plutonium in early November 1974, putting her at serious risk for cancer later in life. At the 11-week trial, workers testified about lapses in safety, including painting over the remnants of plutonium spills, failure to disclose cancer risks to workers, advance warning of government inspections, policies of operating the plant under conditions when it should have been temporarily shut down for decontamination, and insufficient security to prevent plutonium from being removed from the plant. Radiation expert Karl Z. Morgan testified that Kerr-McGee showed a “callous, almost cruel, hardened disregard” for employee safety.

Kerr-McGee management averred that the plant was in compliance with all government regulations; however, the jury accepted the argument that, with so hazardous a substance as plutonium, compliance was not sufficient to guarantee worker safety.

The documents that Karen Silkwood had promised to the reporter—which were not found at the accident scene—were supposed to prove the existence of serious safety problems at Kerr-McGee. Silkwood's own contamination almost certainly had not occurred at work, but in the apartment she shared with fellow lab analyst Sherri Ellis. The jury rejected Kerr-McGee's defense that Silkwood had spiked her own urine samples with plutonium or had deliberately contaminated herself. Journalist Richard Rashke, in his carefully documented account of Silkwood's death and the subsequent official investigations, suggests that someone at Kerr-McGee may have contaminated Silkwood to frighten her into dropping her union activism.

The negligence suit had originally been intended as one prong of two-part assault on Kerr-McGee Nuclear. Silkwood's father and activist lawyer Dan Sheehan planned to sue the company for conspiring to violate Silkwood's civil rights by preventing her from reporting problems. This suit was abandoned for lack of definitive evidence, even as it led into a tangle of alleged Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) actions against anti-nuclear activists. Government interest in protecting Kerr-McGee Nuclear would not be entirely surprising, thanks to founder Bob Kerr's long career as a powerful Oklahoma Senator.

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