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...
She became a martyr for the Union and for whistle-blowers everywhere, and this film was made to commemorate her in 1983.
There were legal actions after the timeline of the film ended. Her estate (actually her father, on behalf of her three children) sued Kerr-McGee for her contamination in 1979. A jury awarded over $10 million dollars, but a higher court reversed that and made it only $5,000 for the items in her apartment that were removed because of decontamination. The Frontline editors continue, "In 1986, twelve years after Silkwood's death, the suit was headed for retrial when it was finally settled out of court for $1.3 million. The Kerr-McGee nuclear fuel plants closed in 1975" (the Karen Silkwood story, 2008). There is still no definite answer on what happened to Karen Silkwood, or who caused her death, and America may never know the truth about this tragic incident
References
Editors. (2008). Karen Silkwood biography. Retrieved 25 Nov. 2008 from the Biography.com Web site: http://www.biography.com/search/article.do?id=9542402&page=1.
Editors. (2008). The Karen Silkwood story. Retrieved 25 Nov. 2008 from the Frontline Web site: http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interact/silkwood.html.
Rashke, R. (2000). The killing of Karen Silkwood: The story behind the Kerr-McGee plutonium case. New York: Houghton Mifflin.
