URINE AND PLUTONIUM

Schorr gives his readers the creeps by alluding to mysteries. "Most mysterious of all," he says, "was the fate of a [Crescent, Okla.] plant worker, Karen Silkwood, whose body and apartment had registered dangerously high plutonium levels. As she was driving to meet a newspaper reporter who was investigating plant conditions, her car hit a culvert and she was killed." She had been a union activist who had zealously charged lack of safety provisions in handling plutonium. Schorr reports union charges, according to which members who refused to volunteer for lie detector tests were harrassed by the company, which itself allegedly refuses to discuss the matter. Sounds ominous, doesn't it?

Until one examines the rest of the evidence. The Oklahoma state highway patrol reports that the autopsy revealed traces of alcohol and methaqualone (a sedative) in Silkwood's blood, making it highly probable that she had dozed off at the wheel. More significant, the entire matter was the subject of a probe by a special AEC commission, which published its report more than one month before Mr. Schorr's article, and found only 3 of the 39 union allegations in violation of the tough AEC standards.

It also throws some light on the actions of Karen Silkwood, who emerges as somewhat less than a martyr. The monitoring equipment caught her leaving the plant with dangerous amounts of plutonium on two consecutive days, and again on entering the plant. There had been no accidental release in the plant, and the commission found that her contamination. which included ingested (eaten) plutonium, "probably did not result from an accident or incident within the plant." Perhaps most significant were the urine and fecal samples that she had brought in for inspection on several occasions; they turned out to be (surprise!) radioactive. Two of the urine samples were proved to have been contaminated after they were excreted, so that someone (guess who?) must have doctored them.

Schorr makes no mention of the AEC investigation, let alone its findings. And that is not lousy physics; it is lousy journalism.