Nuclear Energy

Karen Silkwood (February 19, 1946 – November 13, 1974) was an American labor union activist and chemical technician at the Kerr-McGee plant near Crescent, Oklahoma, United States. Silkwood's job was making plutonium pellets for nuclear reactor fuel rods. She discovered what she believed to be numerous violations of health regulations, including exposure of workers to contamination, faulty respiratory equipment and improper storage of samples. She also believed the lack of sufficient shower facilities could increase the risk of employee contamination. In the summer of 1974, Silkwood testified to the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) about these issues, alleging that safety standards had slipped because of a production speedup which resulted in employees being given tasks for which they were poorly trained. She also alleged that Kerr-McGee employees handled the fuel rods improperly and that the company falsified inspection records. On November 5, 1974, Silkwood performed a routine self-check and found almost 400 times the legal limit for plutonium contamination. She was decontaminated at the plant and sent home with a testing kit to collect urine and feces for further analysis. The next morning, as she headed to a union negotiation meeting, she again tested positive for plutonium. This was surprising because she had only performed paperwork duties that morning. She was given a more intense decontamination. The following day, November 7, 1974, as she entered the plant, she was found to be dangerously contaminated — even expelling contaminated air from her lungs. A health physics team accompanied her back to her home and found plutonium traces on several surfaces — especially in the bathroom and the refrigerator. The house was later stripped and decontaminated. Silkwood, her partner and housemate were sent to Los Alamos National Laboratory for in-depth testing to determine the extent of the contamination in their bodies. Silkwood herself asserted that she was the victim of a malicious campaign, and that the testing jars she had been given were laced with plutonium. Kerr-McGee's management asserted that she had contaminated herself in order to paint the company in a negative light. None the less, Silkwood said she had assembled a stack of documentation for her claims. She now decided to go public with this evidence, and made contact with a New York Times journalist prepared to print the story. On November 13, 1974 she left a union meeting at the Hub Cafe in Crescent. Another attendee of that meeting later testified that she did have a binder and a packet of documents at the cafe. Silkwood got into her car and headed alone for Oklahoma City, about 30 miles (48 km) away, to meet with New York Times reporter. However, later that evening, Silkwood's body was found in her car, which had run off the road and struck a culvert. The car contained no documents. She was pronounced dead at the scene from a "classic, one-car sleeping-driver accident".
…Later, Silkwood's father and children filed a lawsuit against Kerr-McGee on the behalf of her estate. The jury rendered its verdict of US $505,000 in damages and US $10,000,000 in punitive damages.

Similar to Karen Silkwoods controversial story that gives light to large corporation corruption, Erin Brockovich is an American legal clerk and environmental activist who, despite the lack of a formal law school education, was instrumental in constructing a case against the Pacific Gas and Electric Company (PG&E) of California in 1993. The case alleged contamination of drinking water with hexavalent chromium, also known as chromium(VI), in the southern California town of Hinkley. At the center of the case was a facility called the Hinkley Compressor Station, part of a natural gas pipeline connecting to the San Francisco Bay Area and constructed in 1952. Between 1952 and 1966, PG&E used hexavalent chromium to fight corosion in the cooling tower. The wastewater dissolved the hexavalent chromium from the cooling towers and was discharged to unlined ponds at the site. Some of the wastewater percolated into the groundwater, affecting an area near the plant approximately two miles long and nearly a mile wide. The case was settled in1996 for $333 million, the largest settlement ever paid in a direct action lawsuit in US history.

Aside from these two influential ladies stories, The Three Mile Island is best known for having been the site of the worst civilian nuclear accident in United States history on March 28, 1979. The accident was a result of a cooling system malfunction that caused a partial melt-down of the reactor core. This resulted in the release of a significant amount of radioactivity into the environment. Athough the accident did not induce any adverse health effects, it did encourage federal changes. Public reaction to the event was probably influenced by the release of the movie The China Syndrome 12 days before the accident, depicting an accident at a nuclear reactor. Communications from officials during the initial phases of the accident were felt to be confusing. The accident further influenced anti-nuclear safety concerns among activists and the general public, resulted in new regulations for the nuclear industry, and has been cited as a contributor to the decline of new reactor construction that was already underway in the 1970s.

In all three of these stories, environmental movement and responsibility (or lack there of) can be seen as a detrement to our society and to our environment. Not only are environmental companies influencing our standard of living, as seen above, but they are also influencing our environment and in turn responsible for global warming as a result. It can be said that the Three Mile Island accident, which tainted the public's opinion and "fueled" activists rants regarding fossil fuel vs. Nuclear energy, and the two individual stories above regarding environmental corporation corruption, has ignited a society dependent solely on coal and oil and has petrified society away from other energy sources. These factors are the largest contributors to global warming in our environment today and are proven very detrimental to our way of life.