K.+Getchonis+nuclear+project+2

__**KAREN SILKWOOD**__ by Kelly Getchonis

Karen Silkwood was a famous chemical technician who worked at the Kerr-McGee's plutonium fuels production plant in Crescent, Oklahoma. She was also a member of the Oil, Chemical, and Atomic Workers' Union. But that was not her only job she took on an even bigger job, being an activist, her fight was against plant safety. The first time Karen Silkwood discovered plutonium-239 was the fifth of November. She worked hard to find this element she spent most of her days in a glove box in a metallographic lab polishing and or grinding plutonium pellets to use for fuel. At around 6:30 P.M. Karen did testing on herself for alpha activity, on her right side was what seemed to be 20,000 disintegrations per minute also known as 9 nanocuries, it was mostly found on her right sleeve and shoulder. She soon taken to the plant's Heath Physics Office where they tested the measures of o persons exposure to and type of plutonium. The test read positive with about 160 disintegrations per minute.

The first thing Karen Silkwood did once she got back to the lab was test all her materials for traces of plutonium. Strange enough there was nothing on the inside of her gloves only on the outside and no holes for the plutonium to leak through, there was also no sign on plutonium in the air. Everyday when Karen would leave the plant she would monitor herself, but she found nothing. On November 6 when Karen went to work the Heath physics staff members tested her and found further activity all over her hands, neck and face. So the Heath team checked her lockers but nothing was found. Later on the Heath team did more examinations and found tons of extremely high levels of activity, but they had no idea where it came from. Finally they found where the plutonium was hiding, in her apartment mostly in the bathroom and kitchen. Karen quickly got her two other room mates who spent alot of thier time in the appartment, to get tested for plutonium to see if it effected them as much as it had effected her. Fortunatly they had very little plutonium in them unlike Silkwood who had a monsterious amount running through the inside of her body.

Silkwood was very concered on the effect plutonim would have on her. One of her many questions was, is she still able to have babies and if she did would they be deformed. Lucky the doctor informed her that she should be able to have normal children and it shoudnt effect her in anyway. After the testing was finished the doctors sent Silwood and her room mates home. So Karen went back to work even through she was no longer able to work with radioactivity. After work she had a meeting with the union in Cresent, Oklahoma. She was about to expose the company for poisoning its workers and irresponsibly manufacturing radioactive plutonium rods, with alittle help from a New York Times reporter. The meeting ended at around seven o' clock P.M. Karen was last seen leaving the meeting alone. Only seven miles into her drive home the Oklahoma Highway Patrol was notified that there was a single car accident and Karen Silkwood was the driver. She was found in her White Honda Civic in a ditch off of the narrow Route 74, Karen was dead from many injuries. The state trooper said her accident was most likly a one-car sleeping-driver accident. Not long after the accident they did test on Karens body and found almost twice the amount of recommended dosage for inducing dowsiness running through her body.

Soon they ask her father, on the phone, if they could do an autopsy to see if they could find if the accident had anything to do with the plutonium. When they went in they found 3.2 nanocuries in the liver, 4.5 nanocuries in the lungs, and a little more than 7.7 nanocuries in her whole body, thats alot of plutonium. It has been an on going case weither to sue the plants or not. Finally twelve years after Silkwoods death, in the year of 1986, the court settled for 1.3 million dollors, and the Kerr-McGee nuclear fuel plants closed in 1975.

http://www.wikileaks.org/wiki/Karen_Silkwood http://www.greenleft.org.au/2001/458/25546 http://www.findadeath.com/Decesed/s/Karen%20Silkwood/karen_silkwood.htm http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/shows/reaction/interact/silkwood.html