Karen Gay Silkwood (February 19, 1946 – November 13, 1974) was an American laboratory technician and labor union activist known for reporting concerns about corporate practices related to health and safety in a nuclear facility.

While driving to meet with a New York Times journalist and an official of her union's national office, she died in a car crash, the circumstances of which were never explained entirely.

[2] In the fall of 1964, she enrolled at Lamar State College of Technology in Beaumont, Texas on a scholarship from the Business and Professional Women's Club.

After the couple filed for bankruptcy due to Meadows' excessive spending habits, and after his refusal to end an extramarital affair, Silkwood left him in 1972 and relocated to Oklahoma City where she worked briefly as a hospital clerk.

[5][6][7] In August 1972, Silkwood was hired as a metallography laboratory technician with the Kerr-McGee Corporation at their Cimarron River plutonium production plant near Crescent, Oklahoma.

The company's managers also began "working behind the scenes to entice workers to sign a petition calling for a decertification election to eliminate the union.

She discovered at the Cimarron plant what she considered to be numerous violations of health regulations, such as exposure of workers to contamination, faulty respiratory equipment, and improper storage of samples.

The committee members voiced their complaints about the dangerous workplace conditions and sought advice on how to win the upcoming decertification election.

In their discussions, Mazzocchi learned that the committee members (and presumably the rest of the Cimarron plant) were not adequately informed about the hazardous material they were working with.

"[13] At the conclusion of the meeting, Mazzocchi and his staffer Steve Wodka counseled that the best hope for survival of the Cimarron workers and their local was to raise awareness about Kerr-McGee's practices with the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and the national press.

They claimed that "the Kerr-McGee plant had manufactured faulty fuel rods, falsified product inspection records, and risked employee safety".

[3] On September 27, Silkwood testified to the AEC about having been contaminated with plutonium, and she alleged that safety standards had been relaxed because of a need to increase production.

[9][15] The whistleblowing effort and the visibility it brought—combined with the educational sessions on plutonium toxicity that Silkwood arranged with the atomic scientists (attended by one hundred of her co-workers)[12]—helped fight off decertification.

A health physics team accompanied her back to her home and found plutonium traces on several surfaces, especially in the bathroom and the refrigerator.

Silkwood, her boyfriend Drew Stephens, and her roommate Sherri Ellis were sent to Los Alamos National Laboratory for in-depth testing to determine the extent of the contamination in their bodies.

Another attendee at the meeting, Wanda Jean Jung, stated in a sworn affidavit in January 1975 that Silkwood had a folder, a spiral notebook, and a packet of documents with her at the cafe.

[21] During a break in the meeting, Jung said she spoke with Silkwood who was crying quietly and admitted how frightened she was "that she had been so badly contaminated, she would eventually get cancer and die from the plutonium in her lungs.

[25] The car had run off the left side of State Highway 74, traveled some distance along the grass shoulder, and then struck the wing wall of a concrete culvert 0.11 miles (180 m) south of the intersection with West Industrial Road (35°51′N 97°35′W / 35.85°N 97.58°W / 35.85; -97.58).

The Oklahoma state trooper at the crash site remembers that he found one or two tablets of the sedative methaqualone (Quaalude) in the car, and what he believed were two marijuana joints.

[29] Based on his examination, Silkwood had not fallen asleep while driving: "The steering wheel was bent back on the sides, proving she'd been wide awake and hanging on tight as she tried to maintain control.

The first was the anomalous fact that her car had veered from the right lane to the left shoulder:"In most one-vehicle accidents where the driver has gone to sleep, or because of impaired abilities," Pipkin noted, "the vehicle has always gone off to the right because of the contour of the road, namely the crown."

In light of Pipkin's findings, some friends and journalists theorized that Silkwood's car was rammed from behind with intent to cause a fatal crash.

[34] OCAW officials Mazzocchi and Wodka did not believe it was premeditated murder because that stretch of highway is flat, and the odds of her hitting an obstruction like a concrete culvert were so remote.

She drove evasively, including speeding along the left grass shoulder, and while looking behind her or to her right at the chase car, she didn't realize until too late that she was racing toward the culvert.

On appeal in federal court, the judgment was reduced to US$5,000 (the estimated value of Silkwood's losses in property at her rental house), and the award for punitive damages was reversed.