Silkwood and After
What follows is the story of Karen Silkwood and her courageous struggle for worker health and safety in the Kerr-McGee Nuclear Corporation. Written by Jim Garrison and Clair Ryle, the article appeared in the December 1979 - January 1980 issue of Undercurrents (see Resources), and tells how Karen was killed on her way to present documented evidence of plant violations to a recorder and a union official. The documents she carried have never been found.
When Karen Silkwood was run off the road and killed on Nov.13 1974, she was carrying documentation that she said would prove conclusively that the Kerr-Mc Gee (KM) Nuclear Corporation was guilty not only of gross violations of worker health and safety standards but of quality control regulations as well, She worked at the KM plutonium facility in Oklahoma as a lab technician; she was also a union representative with a special responsibility for the area of worker health and safety. As a union representative for this area, she had interviewed all the KM workers who had ever reported management violations of the health and safety rules; she had memorized the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) regulations promulgated to safeguard the health of the workers and she had conducted her own health and safety inspections of the plant during her free time, compiling a list of over forty serious violations. Her concerns were primarily because of the fact that workers were put on the plutonium production lines without any training in many cases; because of radioactive spills that were so large that dozens of workers were getting irradiated at a time; and because the KM management in order to meet production quotas, ordered the workers to stand in the contaminated areas and continue working while clean-up crews attempted to clean up the mess around them.
Magic Marker
The most serious violation Karen discovered, however, involved the fact that KM official; were knowingly 'doctoring' with magic marker, the safety inspection X-rays which, by AEC regulations, had to be taken of each plutonium fuel rod to insure that it was not leaking radiation through faulty welding. The AEC demanded perfectly welded fuel rods because, if defective, they could cause a serious accident in the plutonium fired liquid metal fast breeder reactor they were designed for. On Nov. 1 just 12 days before she was killed, Karen finally secured copies of two separate 'magic-marker doctored' fuel rod safety inspection X-rays, doctored by one Scott Dotter, the special laboratory technician who the KM management had specifically assigned to conduct the final safety inspection X-raying of the fuel rods. Silkwood discovered that not only was he
doctoring up the X-rays indicating faulty welds but that the mere number of the fuel rods he 'cleared' each week was itself a direct violation of AEC regulations requiring that no one inspector be allowed to give the final clearance on over a certain percentage of the fuel rods leaving the plant.
On the night of Nov. 13, Silkwood was carrying the above information to Steve Wodka, a union official, and to Dave Burnham, an investigative reporter for the 'New York Times'. She never got to the meeting. As mentioned, she was hit in the rear, forced off the road, and killed. Her car was towed away, and the documents she had with her disappeared.
Callous
Over four years later, in the Spring of 1979, a federal court case brought against KM by Karen's parents has proven that what she was asserting concerning KM was in fact true. One of the witnesses, Dr. Karl Morgan, often referred to as the 'father of health physics' for his role in the setting of standards for radiation releases in nuclear facilities, testified that the KM plant where Karen had worked was the 'filthiest' nuclear facility he had ever seen in his thirty year-sin the industry besides the reprocessing plant in New York. He further stated that KM showed a 'callous' attitude towards the safety of its workers, pointing out that the KM training manuals made no mention of the fact that one could contact cancer from radiation exposure.
Paper geigers
Former plant workers stated under oath that their training had been so deficient that teenage workers, not even aware that plutonium was toxic, often played at who could get " the hottest the fastest". Workers said that plutonium spills were often painted over instead of cleaned up if they kept happening in the same place often enough, workers left the plant contaminated, and plant supervisors were warned ahead of time of upcoming ';surprise' AEC inspections. There was also testimony stating that workers used uranium for paper weights, threw it around the rooms at each other, and even took uranium home to give to the children to take to school for 'show and
tell'. One of the four plant supervisors, Jim Smith, branded the KM nuclear Facility a 'pigpen', testifying that security was so lax, workers could have thrown plutonium over the back fence or simply taken it past the guards by telling them it was to be thrown out as waste.
As to the question of the faulty fuel rods, workers testified that there were defects in both the stainless steel tubes that form the outside of the rods and in the fuel pellets put into the stainless steel tubes. One worker, Ron Hammock, testified that 'even though we rejected them, we would go ahead and ship them because we were too far behind in production.' He said workers under orders from their KM supervisors would simply sand down the welds which seemed defective, which weakened them even further .
Guilty
After hearing these facts, the six person jury found KM guilty and decided to award $ 10 million in punitive damages to deter KM from continuing negligent corporate practices that endanger the lives of employees. The jury also awarded $ 550,000 for personal injury damages, making KM responsible for the plutonium planted in Silkwood's apartment a week before her death and for the internal bodily contamination she suffered as a result.
The Silkwood victory is still not complete, however, for the faulty fuel rods she died trying to reveal the facts about are slated to be used in the plutonium Fast Flux Test Facility (FFTF) before the end of the year. Loading of the fuel pins is expected to start in November, 1979, and the reactor is scheduled to 'go critical' in the Spring or Summer of 1980.
Owned by the Westinghouse Hanford Company, the FFTF is located near Richland, Washington, and is considered the current centrepiece of the long and so far unsuccessful campaign by the government and the nuclear industry to commercialise the liquid metal fast breeder reactor (LMFBR).
Dream cycle
LMFBR 's are the nuclear industry's dream of the future and the answer to the industry's most critical question : where to get enough fuel to keep their plutonium economy running. Nuclear power plants are now fueled with uranium but less than one percent of natural uranium is the fissionable isotope U-235 which the reactors need to operate. When uranium is mined, therefore, it must go through an extremely capital and energy intensive process to 'enrich' it to the desired level of U-235 - generally between 3 and 4%. The inherent inefficiency of this process, however, coupled with skyrocketing prices for both the uranium itself and the energy used to mine mill, enrich, fabricate, and transport it is threatening the entire industry with economic bankruptcy .
The answer given to this problem is not the obvious one: that the nuclear fuel cycle be shut down and recycled into alternative energy schemes. Rather, government and the nuclear industry assert that what must be done is to build huge breeder reactors which will produce or 'breed' new plutonium fuel even as it burns the fuel in its core. This is accomplished when atoms of abundant but otherwise useless Uranium-238 absorb neutrons which are produced in the fissioning of the plutonium. The breeder thus turns into fuel part of the 99% of the natural uranium which ordinary reactors do not use.
Failure point
Various designs have been proposed for breeders, but the one which has been selected for development is the LMFBR - so called because it uses liquid sodium metal as a coolant, and because it relies on fast moving neutrons for breeding.
The Westinghouse FFTF has been designed as a testing facility for future breeders. It is not designed to generate electricity; instead, the 400 megawatts of power it generates - an enormous amount for a 'test' facility - will be dumped into the desert air of eastern Washington. Nor will the FFTF breed any plutonium, as this is unnecessary for its experimental purposes. In every other way, however, it will operate exactly like a LMFBR.
The Department of Energy, who contracted the Westinghouse Corporation for the facility, plans to push some fuel rods to their failure point. It also plans to place in test positions fuel that is known to be defective. Although the 'excerpts' insist that there is no danger in this, they base these assertions on 'mathematical modeling' and computer predictions. They expect the FFTF to 'verify' these predictions. But what if their predictions are wrong? If they are, the people living near the facility will be the real experimental guinea pigs.
Supercritical
Nor is this all. The 9,000 fuel rods that the KM plutonium plant produced are to be used as the 'driver' fuel which will power the reactor. Faulty fuel rods here are acknowledged even by the government to be potentially catastrophic, for a faulty fuel rod can cause a disturbance in the flow of the sodium coolant. If this is done, then the liquid sodium might not reach a portion of the fuel it is meant to cool. This blockage can lead to what the 'experts' euphemistically call a 'core disruptive accident'. In plain English this means a nuclear explosion. Unlike normal reactors which, if there is a meltdown release larger amounts of radioactivity in the form of a cloud, breeders, because they work off plutonium, can go supercritical and explode like nuclear bombs.
As early as January of 1975, the Westinghouse Corp. receiving the KM fuel rods stated that 57 of one particular shipment were not 'free of all visible oxide, scale, splits, laps, cracks, scams, inclusions and other defects. Thirty-eight of these were eventually accepted by the Department of Energy, however because it 'determined that the defects were minor', according to Leroi Rice, a quality control official at the project. A May 1975 report from Westinghouse indicates that a quality assurance supervisor was using scotch brite on fuel pins listed as having clad inclusions. Although the inspector was told that these pins would not be shipped, they were shipped the following month.
Appeasement
KM engaged in a production speedup around June 1974, as well which according to worker testimony in the Silkwood trial led to a situation where even inspection of the fuel rods ceased. When the speed-up was announced, they no longer examined all the sides of the fuel rods, only the side visible to them. A later report by the Energy Research Development Agency (ERDA) confirmed this testimony, although KM replied that the regulations did not require a complete examination. The workers also pointed out that visual examination could not reveal defects on hidden surfaces. To appease the public and fulfill their regulatory responsibilities, ERDA did eventually evaluate some fuel rods from one particular lot and had two of the rods examined through cross sectioning. ERDA's findings were that the rods examined were acceptable.
A report by Battelle laboratories in Hanford three months later, however, asserted that one of the fuel rods ERDA had examined contained a large defect that has not been detected in previous examinations.
Protest now!
A Government Accounting Office (GAO) investigator finally stated the obvious by recommending that each and every fuel rod be checked. The Department of Energy, however, has resisted this recommendation and has refused to even let an independent investigative panel undertake a study of the fuel rods. The official reason for this refusal is that any such study would be 'prohibitively expensive'. When the plant was proposed in the late 1960's, it was expected to cost$ 7.5 million. now that construction is complete, costs have risen to over $ 647 million. Inserting the fuel rods and firing up the reactor will bring total costs to over $ 1 thousand million. With the lives of people all over the north west part of the United States at stake, we must ask the Department of Energy whether this is the time to start cutting costs.
Time is short. The fuel rods are scheduled to be fixed into the core this month but they have not yet actually started to do this. Local anti-nuclear organisers around Richland, Washington have asked for national and international support. They have asked that letters be sent to certain key senators who have expressed interest in holding hearings on the matter. If hearings are held, the current schedule of fuel rod insertion will be postponed indefinitely. The two Senators are Sen. Hart and Sen. Hatfield. Any letters sent to Sen. Hart should ask specifically that he call for in-depth hearings on the FFTF through reviewing the material. The letter to Hatfield should
encourage him to continue the inquiries into the Nuclear Regulatory Commission recommendations to the Department of Energy on the safety issue concerning the FFTF. He had stated that if he is not satisfied with the Department of Energy's response he will ask the GAO to hold hearings. At this time the GAO appears to be the only branch of the US government that is capable of holding objective hearings.
ADDRESSES:
Senator Gary Hart
254 Russel
Senate Office Building
Washington, D.C. 20510
Senator Hatfield
1401 Dirksen
Senate Office Building
Washington D.C. 20510
FOR MORE INFORMATION:
Claire Ryle, Jim Garrison
RADIATION & HEAL TH
INFORMATION SERVICE,
9 Marion Close
Cambridge CB3 OHN
England
LOCAL CONTACT PERSON:
Hanford Conversion Project
P.O. Box 524 Pasco, WA, 99301
USA