Chapter 10

DECEMBER 1974

On December 1, three weeks after Karen Silkwood’s death, Kerr-McGee got the union contract it wanted. Union demands for better training and health and safety precautions were buried like plutonium waste. But Kerr-McGee was not smiling. AEC inspectors were all over the plant, interviewing management and checking quality-control records.

As if to retaliate against the already demoralized union, Kerr-McGee closed the Cimarron facility for two weeks at Christmastime. Company officials told workers the halt was necessary to discover who had “contrived” the latest incidents at the plant. The OCAW called the action “intimidation.”

The day before the shutdown, two Kerr-McGee employees had found twenty-five “low-enriched” uranium pellets scattered outside the plant but inside the main security fence. The FBI was called in to investigate. It concluded that someone stood either on the shipping-loading dock or near the uranium lab and tossed out the pellets, but it couldn’t learn who the culprit was. Kerr-McGee claimed the workers scattered the pellets to embarrass the company. The workers believed K-M did it to discredit the OCAW.

The day after the pellet incident, a safeguards clerk picked up a package of contaminated waste. She weighed the bundle according to AEC regulations, then placed it on the table near the scale while she removed her gloves to make a log entry. Her left hand brushed the package; she felt moisture on her skin. A quick monitor showed 1 million d/m.

The same day, four workers were at the glove boxes when liquid containing plutonium leaked through a thermocouple. All four were exposed to airborne plutonium. The Oklahoma City papers reported the pellet-scattering incident and the contaminations.

Not only did Kerr-McGee close the plant; it asked every worker to take a polygraph test. “The Company has an obligation to make sure the facility is operated safely and reassure employees and the public of its safe operations,” Kerr-McGee Corporation president James J. Kelly announced. He later claimed the test was “voluntary.”

Among Kerr-McGee’s official list of polygraph questions were: “Have you ever had any contact with Steve Wodka? Do you know anyone in the process of filing a civil suit against Kerr-McGee? Have you had contact with Drew Stephens since November 4? [Silkwood discovered she was contaminated on November 5.] Have you participated in anti-nuclear activities? Since November 4, have you furnished any outside personnel information about the Cimarron plant? Have you ever committed an act you considered to be detrimental to the Kerr-McGee Corporation?”

The test also asked each subject if he or she had ever used narcotics or drugs since being employed at Kerr-McGee, if he or she knew anyone who used them, if he or she had stolen anything from the plant or knew anyone who had. Kerr-McGee had a legitimate concern about drugs. A small group of workers was smoking marijuana on the job, and Kerr-McGee managers could smell the grass in the dining room, locker rooms, and hallways.

The OCAW alleged that Kerr-McGee also asked workers questions not on its typed list, for example: Did they belong to the union, or have an affair with anyone at Kerr-McGee, or talk to Karen Silkwood? “The message thus conveyed to the employee was obvious and unmistakable,” the OCAW emphasized. “Being a union member, or talking to such union representatives as Steve Wodka and Karen Silkwood, were dangerous and undesirable activities … The polygraph interrogation of employees about their union membership activities is inherently coercive and unrelated to any possible company objective.”

The OCAW advised the members of the Kerr-McGee local to refuse the test as an invasion of privacy. “The results … are notoriously unreliable which is probably the reason that very few labor arbitrators and almost no courts allow evidence of such tests to be introduced or even alluded to in cases before them,” President Grospiron wrote.

JANUARY 1975

The plutonium plant reopened in January 1975, with a Kerr-McGee caveat. “The Cimarron facility is a private enterprise having contracts with other privately owned companies,” Kerr-McGee said in a directive to all employees. “Information concerning its operation, practices, and personnel is proprietary or ‘company confidential’ and is to be released to the public only when authorized through the procedure … which provides for company review, verification of accuracy, and approval of information to be released.”

Tice, Brewer, and five other union members who refused to take the lie detector test were transferred to an isolated warehouse in which no nuclear materials were stored or handled. They were under constant supervision. They couldn’t chat with the other workers during breaks or lunchtime.

At the end of January, Brewer was fired for an alleged time-card irregularity, going to his car during a break, and not having the “proper” attitude. The same day, Tice was transferred to the “wet end ceramic area” of the uranium factory, one of the dirtiest places in the Cimarron plant. Kerr-McGee assigned him a supervisor to make sure he wouldn’t even urinate alone. To Tice that was harassment and a humiliation.

Kerr-McGee leaned hard on Tice, appealing to his sense of loyalty. It told him the workers respected him and that if he submitted to the test, others would, too. Tice had nothing to fear, the company said. It knew he didn’t smoke grass or steal. Besides, Tice had a duty to improve the working conditions at the plant. Wouldn’t he answer a few questions for the record? K-M showed him the basic list, promised that the test would be administered by an independent polygraph testing company, and told him that his answers would be kept confidential. Kerr-McGee did not tell him the test was “voluntary” or that the examiners would ask questions not on the official list. Tice refused to take the test.

James Reading, the K-M security director, later told FBI special agent Lawrence Olson, Sr., that 243 workers had taken the test and 13 had refused, including Tice and Brewer. “Several instances of drug abuse and narcotics usage were detected during the course of these interviews,” Reading said. All those who had admitted smoking grass or taking drugs on the job were fired.

Mazzocchi was angry about the way Kerr-McGee had treated Tice and Brewer, so he fired off complaints to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (which had assumed the AEC’s regulatory duties when that commission was disbanded) and the National Labor Relations Board. He also submitted the firing of Brewer to arbitration under the terms of the Kerr-McGee-OCAW contract.

Arbitrator Paul C. Dugan ruled that Brewer had been fired unjustly, and awarded him reinstatement with back pay. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission sent Mazzocchi’s complaint to the FBI, since interfering with the rights of whistle-blowers in nuclear matters is a federal crime. The FBI passed the OCAW complaint to the Justice Department for a decision as to whether the Bureau should investigate the alleged crime.

The National Labor Relations Board was the only agency that had investigated Kerr-McGee. The NLRB told the FBI that from its “extensive investigation,” it concluded that Kerr-McGee had committed a civil violation of the National Labor Relations Act. Correspondence between the NLRB and the FBI suggests that the NLRB also found evidence that Kerr-McGee had criminally deprived union members of their rights. The NLRB turned the case over to the FBI, gave the Bureau a copy of its report, and did not press civil charges against Kerr-McGee.

While the OCAW was fighting Kerr-McGee over its treatment of Tice and Brewer, the AEC released three reports—one on Silkwood’s contamination; another about the OCAW’s allegations of falsification of K-M quality-control records, made after Silkwood’s death; and the third about health and safety complaints made to the AEC by Silkwood, Tice, and Brewer.

The AEC’s seventy-page report on Silkwood’s November 5, 6, and 7 contaminations was cautious. It concluded that Karen had been contaminated outside the Cimarron plant, and that she’d been contaminated deliberately, because there was no radiation trail from the plant to her apartment. Thus, the .03 mg of plutonium (about $5.00 worth) that contaminated her apartment on November 7 did not blow in through the window, nor was it accidentally carried in on Karen’s clothes. But the AEC said it didn’t know who had contaminated Silkwood or her apartment, and there was no indication from the commission’s report that it had tried to find out.

From Kerr-McGee, AEC, autopsy, and urine- and fecal-sample reports, the following inclusive set of contamination facts emerged:

Someone had spiked two of Silkwood’s urine samples with plutonium pellet fragments. An isotopic study of the plutonium in the spiked samples and the plutonium that contaminated her refrigerator, kitchen, and bathroom on November 7 revealed that plutonium from two different sources at the Cimarron plant was used. No one could find out who had spiked her samples or whether they were spiked at the plant or in her apartment. And no one could determine how the bologna and cheese in her refrigerator had been contaminated and by whom.

Silkwood’s contamination and / or urine-spiking began sometime in mid to late October. No one could determine exactly how many times she had been contaminated during October and November.

Silkwood had eaten and inhaled plutonium. No one could find out how, when, or where she ate it.

An isotopic study of the plutonium that contaminated her refrigerator, kitchen, and bathroom on November 7 showed that the metal came from Kerr-McGee pellet lot 29. The plutonium pellets from lot 29 had been shipped to Hanford, Washington, in August 1974, three months before Silkwood’s apartment was contaminated.

Silkwood did not work directly with pellet lot 29, but she could have stolen some plutonium from it in August and hidden it for three months. After August, a sample from pellet lot 29 was kept in the Kerr-McGee vault. Silkwood did not have access to the vault.

No one conducted a thorough investigation to determine who may have had access to pellet lot 29 in August or to the vault. And no one has ever reported whether or not .3 mg or more of the pellet lot 29 sample in the vault was missing.

A urine sample, which Karen Silkwood had placed in her locker at the Cimarron plant and which was discovered after her death, was not spiked or highly contaminated. This fact suggests that Silkwood’s contaminated samples may have been spiked after she handed them over to Kerr-McGee.

Though there were no answers, the Silkwood contamination at least served one useful purpose. Larry Olson, Sr., wrote in a report: “It is noted that the Silkwood contamination incident is of major scientific importance in that it is the first such time that a human being involved in a contamination incident has been studied in the fashion Silkwood has. She received a full body count at LASL … She died on November 13, 1974, an autopsy [being] performed almost immediately thereafter. This had allowed data to be obtained that has never previously been possible inasmuch as previously science had been limited to obtaining this type of information only through the study of animals … It was fortuitous [sic] that she did not get DPTA.”

In its second report—on allegations that K-M quality-control records had been doctored—the AEC said that a lab analyst, Scott Dotter, had touched up forty quality-control negatives with a felt-tipped pen. Lab analysts worked with sixty-rod lots. Once the ends of a lot were welded shut, two of the rods went to the Metallurgy Lab for tests. If the two rods passed, the lab analyst took a four-by-five-inch black and white exposure of the sample welds. Prints were submitted to Westinghouse as part of the documentation proving the fuel rods met specifications. If either of the two sample rods was defective, further tests had to be made on the remaining fifty-eight rods in the lot. By touching up the negatives, Dotter could provide a flawless documentary print for Westinghouse.

Dotter admitted he had touched up the negatives. He signed a statement saying he did it without the knowledge and consent of Kerr-McGee management, and that he only doctored flaws in the negatives themselves. At no time, he said, did he try to hide cracks in the rods. A later AEC analysis of the negatives supported Dotter’s explanation. “None of the markings was used to obscure weld defects themselves,” the AEC reported.

The AEC also found evidence that a K-M lab analyst was improperly using analytical data, and that Kerr-McGee workers were inspecting only half of each sample pellet for cracks and chips. But the AEC played down the seriousness of its findings, arguing that K-M’s contract called only for the visual inspection of half of each pellet, and that the plutonium rods were inspected once again at Hanford. “Although the investigation showed some violation of quality assurance procedures,” the AEC concluded, “the Hanford inspections have revealed no evidence to indicate to date that the quality of the fuel pins has been compromised.”

Westinghouse supported the AEC conclusions. It told reporters that initially it had found 3.5 percent of the Kerr-McGee plutonium rods unsatisfactory, mainly because the Westinghouse standards were so high, but that ultimately, because Kerr-McGee had gradually improved the quality, only 0.4 percent of the rods were sent back.

The AEC made a serious blunder, however, which raised questions about the commission’s objectivity and honesty. Its report stated that an AEC investigator had interviewed Jean Jung, who had also complained about quality control, and that Jung had denied there was a quality-control problem at the plant. Jung later signed a sworn affidavit that she never met the AEC inspector on the date the AEC claimed, that she had never met the AEC inspector on any other date, and that she had never discussed quality control with any other AEC inspector. Jung again stated under oath that Kerr-McGee quality control was indeed faulty. Mazzocchi asked the AEC to explain the discrepancy to him. It didn’t.

The AEC’s third report—on Kerr-McGee’s health and safety measures—confirmed that conditions at the plutonium plant were poor. Investigators substantiated in whole or in part twenty of the thirty-nine “allegations” that Silkwood, Tice, and Brewer had made in Washington. The AEC hastened to add, however, that only three of these were violations of AEC rules:

Kerr-McGee failed to notify the AEC when it had shut down for forty-eight hours to decontaminate the plant.

Kerr-McGee placed more plutonium in a work area than was safe, given the high criticality of the element.

Kerr-McGee was using plutonium in a purer form than the AEC allowed.

The AEC further argued that these violations did not threaten the health and safety of the workers.

Mazzocchi and Wodka had mixed feelings about the three AEC documents. They were satisfied that the AEC confirmed Silkwood’s contamination as not being an accident, but they were disturbed that the commission apparently hadn’t tried to find out who had contaminated her. They believed the felt-tip tampering with the negatives had proved Silkwood’s charge that Kerr-McGee was cheating on quality control, but they did not believe the AEC had dug deeply enough, and they were suspicious about why the commission had not. And they were furious with the AEC’s health and safety report.

The commission investigators had relied mostly on Kerr-McGee management for its health and safety information and had approached the investigation with preconceptions. Silkwood, Tice, and Brewer had never made thirty-nine “allegations” against Kerr-McGee. They had presented thirty-nine verbal examples to support four basic charges. The AEC investigated the examples instead of the charges, and did a poor job on them. For example, Silkwood, Tice, and Brewer complained that Kerr-McGee had a 60 percent turnover of workers. The AEC labeled the statement “not substantiated,” claiming that there was only a 35 percent turnover.

But the AEC had distorted the figure. It counted Kerr-McGee management in its tally, whereas Silkwood, Tice, and Brewer had complained about the high turnover of untrained workers. Had the AEC investigated the actual supporting example, it would have learned that approximately 66 percent of the hourly workers had left K-M between January 1, 1974, and October 31, 1974. Furthermore, the AEC did not address the issue that Silkwood, Tice, and Brewer raised: a high turnover of untrained, inexperienced workers is a health and safety hazard.

Deep down, Mazzocchi and Wodka were not surprised at the less than thorough and patently biased AEC reporting. For years, they had distrusted the AEC’s honesty and integrity. And with good reason.

Just three days after Silkwood’s death—after poring over hundreds of memos and letters written by AEC officials and the nuclear industry—The New York Times revealed a massive AEC cover-up of the hazards of nuclear power. For a decade, the AEC had been suppressing studies, some written by its own scientists, that suggested that plutonium and nuclear reactors were far more dangerous than the commission was willing to admit publicly.

The Times’s documents proved that the AEC had ignored recommendations from its own scientists to investigate further the safe use of plutonium and nuclear reactors. They also showed that on at least two important matters, the AEC had consulted with the very industry it was supposed to regulate before deciding to bury a study critical of nuclear safety.

Citing instance after instance, the memoranda, which The New York Times got from AEC whistle-blowers and through Freedom of Information requests, indicated that the AEC was more concerned about public relations than about public health or safety. In September 1971, for example, Steven H. Hanauer, a top AEC official, buried a staff paper that questioned AEC estimates about nuclear reactor safety. “The present goal,” Hanauer wrote, “should be a paper that can be published without hurting the AEC and without inciting a cause célèbre for squelching a paper …”

The AEC also suppressed in 1964 a $120,000 study, conducted by the commission’s own Brookhaven National Laboratory, on how dangerous a major nuclear accident would be. AEC official Stanley A. Szawlewicz pointed out in a November 13, 1964, AEC memo, “The results of the hypothetical Brookhaven National Laboratory accident are more severe than those equivalent to a good-sized weapon and the correlation can readily be made by experts if the BNL results are published …”

Szawlewicz had good reason to be worried. Brookhaven reported that a big nuclear reactor accident would cover an area “the size of the state of Pennsylvania.”

The AEC met twice with the Atomic Energy Forum—the industry’s lobby—about the Brookhaven report. The forum “strongly urged” the AEC not to publish the report “in any form at the present time.”

The AEC bought it. In its press releases, it claimed that that particular Brookhaven report was never completed. When parts of the document were made public eight years later under the threat of a Freedom of Information lawsuit, the AEC called the released portions “the final draft.” It was a simple lie.

And while the AEC was deceiving the public, it was trying to dupe Congress. The General Accounting Office found that the AEC withheld from Congress information showing that the Fast Flux Test Facility at Hanford had a cost overrun of more than $800 million and that the project was taking five years longer than planned.

Even more important to the union, the relationship between Kerr-McGee and the AEC was a cozy one. Both had something to gain by keeping the fuel rods rolling out of Crescent. The AEC’s fast breeder dream would become a reality sooner; Kerr-McGee could hope to make a tidy profit under its fixed-fee contract. The OCAW stood between the dream and the profit.

The AEC got around the OCAW’s complaints about health and safety conditions by keeping its “unannounced” inspections an open secret. James V. Smith, who took the minutes during the company’s morning management meetings, testified under oath that Wayne Norwood would notify all management personnel at least one full week before any AEC “unannounced” inspection. Kerr-McGee cleaned up the plant as best it could before the “surprise” visit, Smith said, and workers were told not to talk to the AEC inspectors.