Silkwood Directed by Mike Nichols.

¶ … Silkwood directed by Mike Nichols. Specifically it will answer specific questions about the movie and what happened after the movie's time period ended. Silkwood is a drama based on a true story about Karen Silkwood, an employee of the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant in Crescent, Oklahoma. A Union worker, she was critical about safety issues at the plant, and the film tells the story of what happened to her as she was about to make her accusations extremely public.

The culprit in this film was Kerr-McGee, the owners and operators of the plant. They knowingly allowed contamination and accidents to occur, they covered them up, and most people believe they were responsible for Karen Silkwood's death in a car accident when she was on her way to meet with a reporter from the New York Times to give him her story about the plant's lack of safety.

The wrongdoing was two-fold. First and foremost, the Kerr-McGee company was at the base of the wrongdoing. They had known safety hazards, the Union complained about them, and they did nothing about them. It also appears that they knowingly contaminated her with plutonium, something that is too horrible to believe, and that they were at the base of her auto accident, as well. The government was involved, however, because she testified in Washington D.C. In front of the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) about problems at the plant, and they did nothing, either. Because the plant supplied the AEC reactor at Hanford, Washington with plutonium pellets, there is speculation the AEC ignored the problem because it might slow down or alter production at the plant (Rashke, 2000, p. xvii). There is also evidence presented in a book that shows that Kerr-McGee or someone working for them may have been responsible for other attempted murders of people connected to this case (Rashke, 2000, p. 295-300).

Silkwood discovers the problems with the plant when she began serving on the health and safety union committee for the plant. Editors of her biography write, "Nonetheless Silkwood became increasingly concerned about health and safety violations that went uncorrected by management, and as 1974 drew on, got involved with the bargaining committee for the union. The Cimarron plant was experiencing sixty percent employee turnover a year, was using second-hand equipment, and was behind on production" (Karen Silkwood biography, 2008). She began to gather evidence about operations at the plant, and she began to become increasingly concerned about the problems she noted at the plant. She began to become more active in Union activities, and she testified in Washington, D.C. about what she had discovered, hoping the AEC would launch an investigation.

Silkwood encountered many obstacles in her attempts to bring the truth out. About ten days before she died, she did a self-check on herself before she left the plant, and discovered she was highly contaminated with plutonium. She was "cleaned" and decontaminated in the plant's decontamination unit, and told to bring in urine and feces samples for testing. They read very high in contamination, as well, and when technicians measured her apartment, it read extremely high. Yet there was almost no contamination in her car on in her locker at the plant. These results began to seem as if the company was deliberately contaminating her, somehow. After she died, it was shown that she had actually ingested plutonium, and many people believe that she was deliberately poisoned to try to shut her up and intimidate her.

The Kerr-McGee plant in Crescent eventually closed down in 1975, but they avoided litigation for years, and in the end, settled out of court with her estate. They still do business, and while many writers have implicated them in Silkwood's death, they have never been prosecuted or held accountable for her death or what happened to her.

After her death, several of her organs were tested for radiation at the Los Alamos Tissue Analysis Program in Los Alamos, New Mexico. Among other things, they found very high concentrations of plutonium in her lungs and liver. They said, "Furthermore, the concentration of plutonium in Silkwood's lung was about 6 times greater than that in the lymph nodes, whereas in typical cases that ratio would be about 0.1. Both of those results indicated that Silkwood had received very recent exposure" (the Karen Silkwood story, 2008). Skeptics believe that Kerr-McGee purposely allowed her to be exposed to high levels of plutonium, and that they were responsible for her death in a one-car accident, as well, on the night of November 13, 1974. When she was found dead in her car, on her way to meet with the reporter, she was supposed to have documentation with her to give to the reporter, but that was never found. In addition, her car had unexplained dents on the back, indicating she may have been pushed off the road, and there was medication in her system, Quaaludes, that did not seem to belong to her (Karen Silkwood biography, 2008). She became a martyr for the Union and for whistle-blowers everywhere, and this film was made to commemorate her in 1983.