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A Case Study of Silkwood vs. Kerr-McGee

Introduction to the Case: Karen Silkwood was an employee at the Cimarron Fuel Fabrication Site, a site owned and operated by the Kerr-McGee Corporation. A member of the local Oil, Chemical & Atomic Workers Union, she helped lead strikes on the plant, and was elected to the union’s bargaining committee, specifically assigned to negotiate regarding health and safety issues at the plant. Silkwood was specifically working on manufacturing plutonium pellets for Mixed Oxide (MOX) reactors. Throughout the summer of 1974, Silkwood testified to the Atomic Energy Commission that safety standards at the plant had been slipping due to a speedup in production earlier that year. After performing a self-check, Silkwood discovered that her body contained almost 400 times the legal limit for plutonium contamination. After inspecting her normal work station, it was determined that the radiation came from an external source. Her home was inspected and found to have plutonium traces on surfaces specifically within the bathroom and refrigerator. Within a week, she had assembled documentations for claims against the company, and was prepared to go public with a reporter from the New York Times. After a union meeting on November 13, Silkwood left to go meet with the Times journalist. She was found dead later that evening in her car, wrecked off the side of the highway; all of the documents she had gathered were missing from her car. Silkwood’s father, Bill, and her children filed a lawsuit for negligence against Kerr-McGee. The trial was held in 1979, with the defense claiming that the contamination within her body was below the federal limits, and claimed that Silkwood may have intentionally poisoned herself to implicate Kerr-McGee. The judge presiding over the case, Frank Theis, told the jury “If you find that the damage to the person or property of Karen Silkwood resulted from the operation of this plant … defendant Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation is liable…”

Technical Concern: The charge is of concern due to the serious implications of the safety standards at the plant not being upheld at a level required by federal regulations. It would raise questions as to what extent other workers at the plant were exposed to the same dose as Silkwood, and if the problems were not just within the plant, and everyone living within the area would also be at risk of exposure. Silkwood alleged that the safety standards at the plant were declining due to an increase in production, therefore she was likely not the only worker at risk due to these lowered standards.

Outcome: The specific law that would have been violated in this case would be 10 CFR 20.1201, which outlines occupational dose limits for adults in the United States. The jury in this case rendered a verdict of $505,000 in damages and an extra $10,000,000 in punitive damages. After an appeal, the judgement was reduced to $5000, and reversing the award of punitive damages. However, in 1984, the U.S. Supreme court restored the original verdict, ruling that “the NRC’s exclusive authority to set safety standards did not foreclose the use of state tort remedies.” Kerr-McGee settled out of court for $1.38 million, admitting no liability in the case.

Concluding thoughts: Personally, I think the significance of this case lies in the fact that it was one of the first cases where the suit resulting from a radiation accident was successful. There was no evidence that Ms. Silkwood was not following the ALARA principles set forth for her position, and therefore since Kerr-McGee was unable to prove that they were following ALARA principles to the best of their abilities, were then held responsible. I think that the most interesting aspect of the case, however, lies in the circumstances around the death of Ms. Silkwood. While I will try to avoid slapping on a tinfoil hat, the fact that all of the documents were missing from her car, and the fact that she was found with almost double the dose of methaqualone recommended to induce drowsiness in her body at the time of her death, certainly raises some questions about what the Kerr-McGee corporation really knew about the potential safety risks at the plant, and whether the declining safety standards highlighted by Ms. Silkwood were even more drastic than originally thought. However, no cases of long term radiation effects have come from former workers of the same fabrication plant, which would lead one to believe that this case and claim were an outlier within the plant itself. Page 13 of this paper outlines the different levels of appeals that the case went through and the specific statements made by some of the judges and juries for those trials: https://dspace.mit.edu/bitstream/handle/1721.1/41588/213482682-MIT.pdf?sequence=2