Radioactive: The Karen Silkwood Mystery - Ep. 2: A Powerful Company

Episode Date: November 19, 2024

Karen Silkwood worked for Kerr-McGee, an oil and gas behemoth that was expanding into the nuclear power industry. Escalating production quotas lead to more accidents at the plant, and Karen quietly travels to Washington DC to report concerns about worker safety to her union and to regulators. Before leaving, she volunteers for a risky assignment.  Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

What's in this McDonald's bag? The McValue Meal. For $5.79 plus tax, you can get your choice of Junior Chicken, McDouble, or Chicken Snack Wrap, plus small fries and a small fountain drink. So pick up a McValue Meal today at participating McDonald's restaurants in Canada. Prices exclude delivery. If you drive 40 miles north of Oklahoma City, you reach a town called Crescent. It's an old farming community, population just over a thousand people. Doesn't have big attractions.

Probably the biggest thing this place is known for is this empty white building we're standing in front of. It looks abandoned. And we're here at what was the Kerr-McGee Plutonium Facility. Bobby, do you look like it did when you were here? No, no. The parking lot out here wasn't all this growed up back then. Scraggly weeds poke through the pavement. A couple of orange dumpsters sit outside like they're waiting for something to happen.

This single-story building, it looks pretty unremarkable, like the kind of place you'd go past and not even notice it. But for us, this isn't just some random place, not by a long shot. This is what used to be the Kermagee Plutonium Processing Facility, the place where Karen Silkwood worked in the 1970s. I've actually been here a few times before. I've reported on the decades-long process of getting this plant cleaned up after it closed. Well, they insist that this building is completely decontaminated.

Let's go take a look. We've gotten special permission to be here today, and we've invited Karen Silkwood's son, Michael, to join us. This is the door your mom would have walked through. Going to work every day. Right. And we have alarms going off. I know we're here.

Hope it's not a radioactive detector. All right, I'm getting the cobwebs. There are literally thick cobwebs that look like Halloween decorations. So much about this place feels haunted. The three of us are here on a kind of pilgrimage. We have a lot of unanswered questions about what happened to Karen Silkwood. This site represents the last chapter of her life. So we've come here to see where that chapter started. Watch your step. They got some wires thrown out across here.

There's not much left here in this stripped-down husk of a building. Most of the equipment and furniture's been taken out. So it makes it kind of hard to imagine what it would have looked like when Karen worked here, when she and her co-workers walked these hallways in white jumpsuits. They were here to process radioactive plutonium and uranium to make fuel rods to power a nuclear reactor. Wow. You know something? This is really spooky. It gets a little spookier back in here. Great. And the electricity flickering on and off doesn't add to the ambiance at all. It's a very unnerving place to be.

add to the ambiance at all. It's a very unnerving place to be. It's echoey and hard to see, not friendly, not warm. We have to use our phone flashlights so we don't trip. Watch your step here. Knowing how much radioactive plutonium traveled in and out of this place, and according to government documents, into the bodies of the people who worked here. All of it just kind of gives me the creeps. This hollowed out plant is a place of contradictions. Once, more than 50 years ago, it was a symbol of hope and new beginnings. For Karen Silkwood, for the state of Oklahoma, where energy companies offered some of the best-paying jobs around. And even hope for a growing, energy-thirsty nation looking for new sources of power. Plutonium didn't exist on Earth until man brought it to life in a nuclear reactor.

And tomorrow, plutonium will be furnishing much of the electric power for your home. Plutonium will be furnishing much of the electric power for your home. Back in Karen's day, there were plenty of politicians and big business types who insisted that nuclear power could be the way to the future, that it could be cheap, abundant, and clean, that nuclear power would drive the nation and provide a limitless source of electricity, and that it would pave the way for American energy independence. But of course, the dream of cheap and abundant nuclear power never became a reality, and Karen's hopes of contributing to that dream didn't work out either.

Karen never set out to take on a corporate giant or even become a union leader. But she believed the place was dangerous for workers and maybe even for the rest of us. And she couldn't look away. And she may have ended up paying a big price for that. From ABC Audio, this is Radioactive. The Karen Silkwood Mystery. Episode 2, A Powerful Company. I'm Mike Boettcher.

And I'm Bob Sands. In 1972, an ad ran in the Daily Oklahoma newspaper. Opening for male or female to work as a technician with scientists and engineers. You only need a high school degree and some college chemistry to qualify. The job was perfect for Karen. She loved chemistry and science in general. Here's Karen's son, Michael, again. She was a scientist at heart. So, you know, she had left college, married my father. She probably was like, hey, I'm getting to get back into a scientific field, which is something that she really excelled at and wanted to be a part of. Maybe this could

get her back on track, a fresh start after her divorce and having to be a part of. Maybe this could get her back on track, a fresh start after her divorce and having to leave her kids behind. The job was at a nuclear fuel processing plant that was owned by the Kerr-McGee Corporation. They were a huge oil and gas company that had been making a big push into nuclear power. Here's a clip from the Oklahoma Historical Society. Kermagee refers to itself today as a natural resources company, for in addition to petroleum, it is deeply involved in gas and coal, and is one of the nation's largest producers of nuclear energy. energy. Kermagee no longer exists. It was acquired by another oil company for more than $16 billion back in 2006. But in the early 1970s, Kermagee was a really big deal. It was a Fortune 500 company with nearly 10,000 employees. And its power and reach ran deep, real deep, especially here in

Oklahoma, where we have streets named after its namesakes. One of the company's founders, Robert S. Kerr, was governor of Oklahoma in the 1940s and then became a U.S. senator. So the company had real pull in D.C. and the corridors of power on Capitol Hill. Kerr-McGee drilled for oil, they refined it, and then they sold the end products at their filling stations. So they did it all, end to end. And in the early 1950s, they got into the uranium business

and later plutonium to make nuclear fuel. The U.S. was in the early days of the Cold War, and after World War II, there was this push to figure out how to use atomic energy, not just to build weapons, but also to generate electric power. And that opened the door for Kermagee to expand from being an oil and gas company into something more. Get groceries delivered across the GTA from Real Canadian Superstore with PC Express. Shop online for super prices and super savings. Try it today and get up to $75 in PC Optimum Points. Visit superstore.ca to get started.

Kirby Gee sat in a power seat. That's Richard Raschke. He wrote the book, The Killing of Karen Silkwood, in 1981. He's updated it and published a new edition for the 50th anniversary of Karen's death. Rashki says there are a few reasons why the company was so powerful in its day. For starters, the U.S. government saw Kerr-McGee as being essential to fighting the Cold War. They were a major producer of the materials the U.S. needed to make atomic weapons, uranium and plutonium. It also was extremely rich. That's power. And here's another reason why Kermagee was so powerful. The company was friendly with a really important federal agency, the Atomic Energy Commission, or the AEC.

The AEC was established just after World War II with a dual mission to both promote and also regulate atomic energy. Balancing those two things got kind of tricky. They were cheerleaders and also watchdogs. Ever heard of a conflict of interest? Still, in this Cold War period, Raschke says the AEC was one of the most powerful agencies in America. So Kerr-McGee, it was in the center of a power bubble, in the center of a power bubble, and it exploited it whenever it could. During the 1950s and 60s, the U.S. government put a lot of effort into developing the peaceful atom and getting the public on board. Many experts believe that the same technology that caused

so much death and destruction at the end of World War II, if harnessed properly, could be the ticket to progress and prosperity. There is much more to the radioactive atom than a bomb. Scientists saw its peaceful possibilities from the beginning, and today the radioactive atom is hard at work in five broad areas of human endeavor. The first, power. Little kids were even pitched messages about the friendly atom on a Disney TV show. The atom is our future. It is a subject everyone wants to understand.

subject everyone wants to understand. So we've made plans to build an exhibit at Disneyland that will show you atomic energy in action. By the 1970s, the Cold War was raging and gas prices were rising because of politics and conflict in the Middle East. There were a lot of players here in the U.S. who were really rooting for atomic energy to work, to boost energy independence. And let's not forget, there was money to be made, government contracts to be had, and Kerr-McGee, they wanted in on all of it. to be had, and Kerr-McGee, they wanted in on all of it. By 1965, Kerr-McGee was one of just a handful of companies licensed by the federal government to take raw ingredients like uranium and then later plutonium and process them into radioactive fuel. In 1972, the same year Karen was hired at Kermagee, the company won a $7.2 million contract

to make plutonium-powered fuel rods for a new experimental nuclear reactor, one of the largest contracts of its kind. The rods Kermagee would make were for a kind of prototype for something called a breeder reactor. And it was a big deal. The peaceful atom on steroids. Now don't ask me what a breeder reactor is. Because unless you're one of those PhDs, you won't understand it either. But what I do know is...

President Nixon was a big booster of this new breeder reactor technology. He gave a speech in 1971. This was in Washington state where a test breeder reactor was being built. The fuel rods that Kerr-McGee made, they'd power this reactor. These new breeder reactors were designed to generate energy more efficiently than regular reactors. That's because they produced more plutonium than they consumed. An endless loop of energy creating more energy creating more energy. And on and on. Remember, it's the early 1970s. The technology was still very new.

was still very new. Here's Nixon again. It seems to me that if a people are to be a great people, we must always explore the unknown. That is why, as far as this particular matter is concerned, in the terms of nuclear power, we must not be afraid. We must explore it. It's going to mean a better life for our people, and we hope a peaceful life with peaceful production for all the people of the world. Thank you very much. We all thought we were doing something that was pretty cool, building this breeder reactor. Don Gummo was one of Karen's friends at the Kerr-McGee plant. They worked in labs next door to each other.

I was pretty much a proponent of nuclear power back in those days. I wouldn't even call Karen anti-nuclear. We both thought, at least early on, that we were doing something noble. Karen worked in quality control. While she was technically working in a lab, the job was more like being on an assembly line, a nuclear assembly line, like any auto plant worker inspecting parts. But in this case, the part she was inspecting would eventually go inside one of those experimental breeder reactors. You wouldn't want those parts to be defective. The lives of people and communities around nuclear plants depended on it. Karen inspected these small green fuel pellets. They were about the size of a pencil eraser. Inside each one was a mix of powdered plutonium

and enriched uranium. To give you a sense of how powerful this stuff was, a single pellet, again about the size of a pencil eraser, could generate as much power as about a ton of coal. Exciting stuff. But after only a few months on the job, Karen saw how the promise of building this new technology Once on the job, Karen saw how the promise of building this new technology collided with reality on the ground. In late 1972, over 100 workers at the plant went on strike, including Karen. They wanted management to address concerns over working conditions, pay, and benefits. Kerr-McGee was known as a pretty brutal operation. Here's Steve Wodka, the union rep Karen got to know in D.C. They didn't seek to negotiate with its unions. They sought to impose a contract

on the workers. And if the workers didn't like the contract, they could go out and strike. workers didn't like the contract, they could go out and strike. And in fact, from late 72 to early 73, there was a nine-week strike. Christmas was coming, and it was cold. Kurt McGee seemed to have no trouble finding workers to fill in. It was a good-paying job for the time. It was above minimum wage, and in the middle of Oklahoma, that was pretty good money. So they always had people come to work there. That's Karen's friend Don Gummo again. He was actually hired during the strike. Don remembers how other union members gave him the stink eye when he crossed the picket line for his job interview.

And Karen just, she just stood out to me and I looked at her and when I look back, she's staring right at me and then she winks at me. Don was just 20 years old, a skinny Oklahoma farm kid with straight sandy colored hair that grazed his shoulders. Today, he's mostly bald with a white coat tee and round glasses. Karen called him Gummy. For some reason, she and I just hit it off right from the start, and we always got along good. And being in adjacent labs, when she'd go to break, I'd go with her, and we'd take lunch together. And just over time, I really got to know her real well, and I've really got to like her real well. Karen made $4 an hour.

That would be about $30 today. Actually, not a bad wage for someone without a college degree, but not exactly big money, considering she was handling an incredibly toxic and hazardous substance. Don Gummo, he never joined the strike or the union. I always say that was my libertarian phase. I just didn't think I needed union membership. I think a lot higher of labor now.

Don wasn't the only one who wasn't big on the union. As the strike unfolded, other union members ditched the picket line. But not Karen. She stuck it out. By the time that strike was over, she was one of around 20 workers still standing on that picket line. The strike didn't end well for Karen and the union. Kermagee got the contract it wanted.

But for Karen, it was the beginning of something. That was her first exposure to what a labor union was like and what kind of commitment you had to make to be able to get somewhere. By the summer of 1974, things were not going well at the plant. To meet production demands, Gummo remembers that Kermagee introduced 12-hour shifts. The plant started operating around the clock. People started quitting in large numbers. At one point, AEC documents showed turnover hit 35 percent. Some of the turnover was because they had seasonal workers, but the turnover put even more pressure on workers like Karen and her friend Don Gummo. You know, as we got more into the project and we started having even minor episodes of spills and so on,

it kind of changed the environment. They got behind on their schedule of making pellets. That was early in 74, and we went to round-the-clock operations at that time, and that's when we had more of those kind of incidences, minor spills and so on. But, you know, it was a chronic situation. It wasn't just the rank-and-file who had these complaints. Production was first. They had a quota to make.

Jim Smith was a manager at Kermagee's plutonium plant. In this recording from 1979, he talked with documentary producers for an independent film called Dark Circle about the nuclear industry. Smith had been with the plutonium plant since the beginning and says it was well run at first, but he said with turnover, the company brought in more inexperienced, poorly trained workers and problems multiplied. Just continual leaks, just one right after the other. Furnace leaks over in the powder plant, valve leaks, pipe leaks, tank leaks. You might say towards the end it was just one big leak, basically. AEC records would eventually show that over 70 workers had been exposed to airborne plutonium. Steve Wodka says the union knew Kerr-McGee had a shoddy track record when it came to safe working conditions.

Profit was number one. And if you run a safe plant, if you really take the precautions, it cuts into profit. Don Gummo remembers this one day when he got hurt in the lab. He was working in something called a glove box. It was this sealed see-through box with thick rubber gloves attached to it, so workers could put their hands in the gloves and handle plutonium inside the box without having to actually come into direct contact with it. It was supposed to keep them safe. On this day, Don was using a hot plate to dissolve some fuel pellets, and was using this nitric acid solution he'd poured inside a glass flask.

Really nasty stuff. It was a bright, angry red color. Don's bosses had taught him a shortcut to speed up the process. By putting a stopper in the flask, it increased the pressure so the solution would heat up faster. Then Karen popped into the lab. Karen stuck her head in and said, hey, Gummy, it's lunchtime. Gummy too, he told her. After his lunch break, he started heating up the flask again. But then, there was a problem. But what had happened is while the hot plate was unplugged, it was cooling off. So those stoppers that were pushed into the top got sucked in even tighter. But when I picked

one up and I was going to set them off the hot plate and let them cool, and it blew up. It just shattered into a million pieces, and that hot nitric acid, from my point of view, is coming right in my face. The steaming acid was actually all contained in the sealed glove box, but his reflexes kicked in in a big way. He fell backwards and cracked his head on the floor. Karen was working in the lab next door. Next thing I know, she's got a respirator, and she's coming in there, and she just took over,

and she got an instrument and made sure that the glove box wasn't leaking. It was all squared away. Then she came over and checked me out to make sure I wasn't contaminated. Don remembers telling Karen that the accident was all his fault, but she was having none of it. She thought it was the company's fault because of time pressure and the shortcuts.

He says Karen was like a big sister to him. He remembers her saying, you're just a dumb technician. What do you know? technician. What do you know? I think seeing me fall and laying there on my ass, it was like she crossed a Rubicon. It's like that was the final straw in all the stuff that she'd seen going on that seemed to be a final straw. final straw. She started taking notes about incidents that she believed were putting workers at risk. Like Don Gamow told us about this other time when he was working in the lab. On this day, some liquid plutonium leaked out of a gasket. His co-workers tried to plug the leak with some super absorbent pads and tape. He says this

contraption was pretty much universally referred to and actually looked like a diaper. But this MacGyver diaper didn't suck up all the liquid. A few drops of plutonium spilled on the floor. And then, of course, as it dried, it became a powder again and went airborne. And it literally, we had to throw chairs and instruments and all kinds of stuff out because just a few drops of that coated everything in the room with a film of plutonium. Airborne plutonium can be extremely dangerous, more dangerous than getting a dusting of it on your skin, because with airborne plutonium, you can inhale it. And once those particles travel inside the body, the radiation they give off can potentially do a lot of damage, including messing with your DNA and potentially causing cancer. After the spill, Don and the other lab workers were told to clean up the contamination

with this solution called Radiac. It was basically Clorox and Tide, and we would make up a batch of Radiac, pour it on the floor, and then slurp it up with a vacuum cleaner. The idea being it would gather up any particles that were on the floor and you could just suck them up that way. In this instance, what it did is it took a little bit of radioactive material and spread it uniformly across the whole room. And it was screaming hot and it was screaming hot for weeks. We had to work in respirators eight hours at a stretch until they could get the mess cleaned up. So it was a big deal.

If it's hot, it's contaminated. Jim Smith, the supervisor who talked about how the plutonium plant was one big leak, he says that plant workers even had their own lingo to talk about how hot or contaminated something was. One guy might say hotter than hell, and the next guy say it's a screaming Mimi, which means when you put the Geiger counter down there, it counts so fast, all it does is scream, you know, it doesn't go click, click, click. In other words, it's so grossly contaminated, even the Geiger counter can't count it. They say it's a screaming Mimi, that means the Geiger counter just goes zing, and that's it.

When you get up there, millions of disintegrations per minute, well, that's a screaming Mimi. That means the Geiger counter just goes zing, and that's it. When you get up there, millions of disintegrations per minute. Well, that's getting up there. These sometimes sloppy conditions at the plant, the long shifts and the pressure to work harder and faster, Karen now saw that her friends were getting hurt in the process. All of this was taking a toll. She wasn't sleeping well, especially after working an overnight shift. Plus, her personal life wasn't going great either. She and her boyfriend,

Drew Stevens, who also worked at the plant, they'd split up, and by this point, Karen had moved in with a roommate. She was depressed and decided to get some help. Here's author Richard Raske again. She went to a doctor. She couldn't sleep. Part of the reason she couldn't sleep is working 12 hours and sometimes doing double shifts and all the pressure she was under. And so he prescribed Quaaludes, and she became dependent on them. Quaaludes are a tranquilizer, and they were commonly prescribed for insomnia back in Karen's day. Her boyfriend would later say that Karen started using Quaaludes to calm her nerves, and the fact that Karen took them and other drugs would later be used to

discredit her and say she was driving under the influence the night she died. But we're getting ahead of ourselves, because before all that, the safety concerns that Karen had would hit a lot closer to home. For the first couple years that Karen worked at the plant, her safety concerns, they came mostly from what happened to her friends and co-workers, other people. But then, and co-workers, other people. But then, on July 31, 1974, for the first time, Karen was exposed to radioactive plutonium-2. She learned about her exposure the day after her shift when some air filter paper in her lab tested positive for contamination. She was later told that her contamination results were low, at least according to the standards set by the Atomic Energy Commission.

Remember, they were the ones who were responsible for setting these standards and for protecting workers like Karen. Up until this point, Karen had been a rank-and-file union member. But when an election was set up for a leadership position on the union's bargaining committee, Karen said she wouldn't say no if she happened to win. And she did win. In fact, she became the first woman to ever hold a leadership role in the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers Union at the plant.

Here's Steve Wodka. Chemical and Atomic Workers Union at the plant. Here's Steve Wodka. The OCAW was, in the early 70s, was a very male-dominated union. The industries we represent, oil refining, chemical plants, huge nuclear facilities, unusual that women worked anywhere and that a woman had risen to a position of leadership in the local union. And now that she was a union leader, she had a formal way to advocate for workers' health and safety. Here's Don Gummo again. I always thought of Karen as a force of nature. She would get

something in her head and she would be driven by it. So I know when she started learning more about the business that we were in, the industry we were in, and the hazards of it and so on, so on, it had a big effect on her. She was concerned that all these farm kids that they had hired to run this thing were at great risk because they didn't understand what it was they were working with. Jack Tice was another OCAW union member who served on the bargaining committee with Karen. He's now 88 years old. Did you worry about getting cancer? Did you know about the cancer risk? I thought I'd be dead by now. Yeah, but you're still kicking. I'm still kicking. You're looking good, by the way. Thank you. Jack's union ties run deep. To this day, he hangs out at the local Teamsters offices in Oklahoma City,

which is where we met up for an interview. He was wearing a U.S. Marines baseball cap and shiny brown cowboy boots. What were Karen's concerns about the plane? Do you know that? Health and safety issues as far as contamination goes. And, you know, wages also. And you shared those same concerns. Yes, absolutely. And what was it about the safety that had you concerned? About the safety that had you concerned. Contaminations.

I mean, you had a contamination get out of control, basically, in a room. And you went into full-face respirators. We'd work maybe with a full-face respirator 10, 12 hours a day, maybe even longer than that, in respirators, which is hard. Working with a respirator is something Don Gummo remembers, too. It was a full-face respirator, and it had a canister, and then, of course, we had to wear a hood underneath the mask. It was a miserable way to spend a shift. After the 1972 strike, workers had returned to the job under Kerr-McGee's terms, a big blow for the union. It lost a lot of members, but Karen hung on. Then in the fall of 1974, more than a third of the union members at the plant signed a petition

requesting to get rid of the union. If enough workers didn't vote to keep the union, it'd be kicked out of the plant. No more collective bargaining. The OCAW wanted to be fighting with Kerr-McGee for safer working conditions. But first it had to fight for its own survival, to convince workers that they were better off having the union represent them. With the vote looming, Karen, Jack, and another union leader at the plant told Kerr-McGee management that they needed to miss work for union business.

They did not want the company to know that they were secretly flying to Washington, D.C. to strategize with national union leaders. It was Karen's first trip to the East Coast. At the end of September 1974, Karen arrived at the OCAW's Washington, D.C. offices. One of the people Karen met on that trip was Steve Wodka. We heard from him earlier in the episode. Back then, Steve was a 25-year-old legislative staffer with the OCAW, Karen and the other union leaders told Steve and his bosses that they'd been keeping track of contamination incidents at the plant, like the diaper incident Gummo described,

incidents where workers had been exposed to radiation. So Steve and his bosses arranged a meeting with the Atomic Energy Commission the next day. Because the company's handling of plutonium were governed by the Atomic Energy Commission. This agency had regulations. It had the power to take Kermagee's license away. But here's the thing. Ever since the company got a license to process

plutonium in 1970, some workers and union members felt the AEC hadn't done much to hold Kerr-McGee accountable. For instance, they claimed whenever the AEC sent inspectors to visit the plant, management usually knew about it in advance. So part of the whole issue was not only was the company doing bad things, but that the Atomic Energy Commission itself hadn't been enforcing the law, hadn't been protecting the workers. And this was the problem with the Atomic Energy Commission in that they had not come down on this company, even though it was clear that this company was routinely violating the conditions of its license. You have to understand there were all these contamination incidents at the plant leading up through to 1974.

Kerbegee was never fined a dollar by the AEC. We reached out to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, the government agency that replaced the AEC, and now regulates the nuclear industry. placed the AEC, and now regulates the nuclear industry. A spokesperson told us that while Kermagee had several violations, none rose to the level of requiring fines at that time. The agency also said that Kermagee was subject to both scheduled and unscheduled inspections. When the AEC investigated a report in 1973 that some nuclear material had leaked at the plant, it gave Kermagee a clean bill of health, saying the leak hadn't been a big deal. Kermagee officials used the same script when stuff like this came up, telling the AEC they'd cleaned up the problem.

In other words, no big deal, folks. We're following the rules. Nothing to see here. That and no comment was pretty much the company line. So the union's expectations were low. But as Steve, Karen, Jack, and another union leader from the plant were preparing for the big meeting with the AEC, something unexpected happened. So I'm working with them and we're going over everything and then this whole issue of quality control starts coming up

and it's something we had never heard of before and something we had never dealt with before. This made Steve's ears perk up. Karen and another union member alleged that someone had been tampering with inspection documents at the plant. They said, Material and rods that should have failed were being passed. And we think you should know about that.

This was news to Steve and his bosses. They started to realize that something really big was at stake if these allegations were true. The more we thought about this, it was, you know, there could be a meltdown. A meltdown, a nightmare scenario for the Hanford plant in Washington, where the rods were headed that could potentially put lives at risk. But they decided not to tell the AEC about this new potential problem at the plant. Not yet. We said, okay, look, we've never heard of something like this before.

And if you're going to level a charge like this against Kern-McGee, it's got to be documented. People have got to see how and where the quality control tests and checks were falsified. When they showed up at the AEC's offices in Bethesda, Maryland, there were far more AEC people than union people in the room. Karen was the only woman. than union people in the room. Karen was the only woman. Steve started ticking through the union's concerns, including how the AEC was allegedly giving Kermagee advance notice before they did an inspection. Then Steve moved on to the list of health and safety issues, including the cases Karen had typed up on a yellow piece of paper. All in all, there were 39 allegations.

Steve laid them out one by one. It took all afternoon. The union had lodged a formal complaint. Mission accomplished. But before Karen and the others headed back to Oklahoma, they huddled with Steve and his boss to make a game plan around their bigger, more serious allegation that Kerr-McGee was fudging inspection reports. They needed evidence. But how? We're all sitting there. And she says, I'll do it.

Karen said she'd poke around the plant and see what she could find to document their claims. Before she left, Steve warned her to keep a low profile. He didn't want anyone to know what she was doing. We were concerned that she was going to get fired. That was the worst thing that we thought could possibly happen. That was about the limit. That was where we were wrong. If she could deliver solid evidence, the plan was to bring that evidence to an investigative reporter. A big national front page story could force the company to address these problems

and give the union some serious leverage in negotiating a better contract. We wanted to see what we could do to bring maximum pressure on them in order so that the local could get a decent contract. That maximum pressure would come if this bombshell story landed in the New York Times, a story that would show the entire world

that this company had been making a defective, possibly even dangerous product. Once Karen got back to Oklahoma, she dedicated herself to this new mission. She started taking notes in a small spiral-bound pad she kept hidden in her pocket. Suddenly, she was a super snoop. It was up to her to get the goods. She made the turn Karen and Steve stayed in close contact.

Late one night, they talked on the phone. Karen had a lot of updates to share, and she was talking really fast. And I said, you know, Karen, I can't take notes on this. I've got to tape you. Can I turn it on? So he turned on a tape recorder. Okay, now talking to Karen Silkwood, and today is Monday, October 7th. I've been discussing what's been going on in the last week since the people from Kerr-McGee are up here.

As we mentioned before, Karen told Steve she was especially worried about the teenage boys at the plant. All right, now what about this getting to these kids joking about getting hot? In the lavatory, we've got 18 and 19-year-old boys. Farm kids Kermagee had hired with hardly any training. She said she'd watched some of them playing around with plutonium to see who could get hot or contaminated the quickest. Okay, then what happened with this gal who you had talked to about plutonium and cancer, and she got all concerned?

How did that come about again? Okay. I'm going to turn to that page. Karen flipped through her notes. She tells Steve about an incident involving her friend Gene Young. You heard from Gene in the last episode. involving her friend Jean Young. You heard from Jean in the last episode. She described seeing Karen in the Hub Cafe looking through documents, and Jean was one of the last people to see her alive. Karen tells Steve that Jean had been working in what's known as a hot room, meaning

it was contaminated. Jean was scared, and so she asked Karen for help. They went together to ask for a nasal smear, a test where they put a swab up your nose to see whether or not you've inhaled plutonium, and how much. Okay. She took the nasal smear, you know, and about three others did it too. When did the smear come out? 24 DPM.

DPM stands for disintegrations per minute. It's one way of measuring radioactivity. According to the AEC, 24 DPMs was safe. But Steve disagreed. Oh, boy, that's bad. Well, you know, it's not super bad. No, no, no, no, hold on, hold on. But Steve disagreed. Well, when these two doctors, when you guys meet up with these two doctors, these doctors are going to flip out when they hear the stories you have to tell. Steve was referring to the scientists from the University of Minnesota he was bringing to meet with workers from the plant a few days later

to teach them about the dangers of plutonium, including cancer. So Karen finishes her story about her friend Gene, who had been crying because she was afraid she'd been contaminated. A health safety officer had apparently told Jean she didn't have anything to worry about. And more than likely, though, it all came out a nasal smear. This is what he told her. She stood there a minute and she says, but you don't know that. She said, I could have got some of that down into my lung. There's stupid s*** going on every day, so it accumulates, doesn't it?

Sure as hell does. If you breathe it once a week for every week for five years that you're out there, you're goddamn well going to have something. you're goddamn well going to have something. But the whole point is that plutonium is so carcinogenic, is so potent, that it's now figured that, you know, under the conditions that you work under in that kind of a plant, you don't have to work there for five years. You might only have to work there for one friggin' month,

and you've got enough of a body burden to cause cancer. Oh, Dave, don't tell me that. Well, yes, I'm going to tell you that because I told you that God, if the union loses this election, I tell you, Karen, you better get the **** out of there. I'll be gone.

Karen said. That place is going to turn into a hellhole. I'm going to shut them down before I go. Well, yeah, we've got ideas on that, too. And we know what their Achilles heel is, but, I mean, you know,

I'm going to turn the tape off for this. It's a little hard to hear, but Karen says, I'm going to shut them down before I go. And then Steve says, we know they're Achilles' heel. When we interviewed Steve in 2024, he told us that he was referring to the doctored quality control allegations

that Karen had been looking into. Because safety issues, sure, those were important. But if Kerr-McGee was shipping off defective fuel rods to the new experimental reactor it was supplying, well, then there was something much bigger going on at the plant. Bigger and possibly more dangerous. More dangerous because the union thought defective fuel rods could really mess with the reactor, maybe even cause a meltdown. But also more dangerous for Karen, who was now snooping around the plant looking for evidence, jotting it down in her little notebook.

Even though Steve Watka told her to keep a low profile, other people started to notice what Karen was doing. Jean Young, the co-worker who'd gotten the nasal smear, told the Dark Circle documentary producers in 1980 that Karen was taking a lot of notes. Everything that happened, she had a little notebook. And anything that happened in that plant, she'd put down the date, the time, and where it happened and who it was. Karen's friend Don Gummo says he even started funneling her documents. She had a mission, because I can remember when she started gathering documentation, she had a folder that she carried with her. I actually made a contribution to that folder.

She was watching, but she also started to suspect that she was being watched too. About a month after the D.C. trip, Dawn got an unexpected visit from Karen. She came over one night. It was after work, so it was like the middle of the night, and she showed up at my house, and she was concerned because she was being followed, and she had lost him. She did her trick with the car and outran him, and she still had concerns, obviously. So she stayed there that night. And actually, that's next morning when she left.

That was the last time I ever saw her alive. About a week later, Karen would have something else tormenting her. Plutonium contamination in her own home. That's next time. We're taking a break next week for Thanksgiving, but we'll be back with a new episode on December 3rd. Radioactive, the Karen Silkwood Mystery, is a production of ABC Audio in collaboration with Standing Bear Productions. I'm Mike Boettcher. My co-host Bob Sands and I served as consulting producers on this podcast,

along with Brent Donis. Thanks to the ABC News Investigative Unit and investigative producer, Jenny Wagnon-Kortz, chief investigative reporter, Josh Margolin, reporter-producer, Sasha Pezenik, and associate producer, Alexandra Myers. This podcast was written and produced by senior producer, Nancy Rosenbaumbaum and Vika Aronson.

Tracy Samuelson was our story editor. Associate producer and fact checker Audrey Mostek. Story consultant Chris Donovan. Supervising producer Sasha Aslanian. Original music by Soundboard. Mixing by Rick Kwan. Ariel Chester was our social media producer. Special thanks to Liz Alessi, Katie Dindas, Cindy Galley,

and the University of Oklahoma's Gaylord College of Journalism. Josh Cohan is ABC Audio's Director of Podcast Programming. Laura Mayer is our executive producer.