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On November 13, 1974 Karen Silkwood a nuclear plant worker at Kerr-McGee nuclear facility died right before she was about to blow the whistle on her company.

Kerr-McGee manufactured fueled rods that contained particles of plutonium in them. Plutonium even in minute quantity is known to cause cancer. The workers at the plant were not told of any dangers the plutonium could cause. Even so Karen Silkwood became increasingly concerned about the health and safety violation that went on at the plant. Silkwood began carrying around notebooks to document any safety violations she saw going on at the plant. She firmly believed that workers on the job were being contaminated by plutonium all the time. Two weeks before her death Karen performed a routine self check and found she was contaminated with over forty times the legal limit of plutonium. At the plant she was decontaminated and sent home with a testing kit to collect urine samples for further analysis. The next day she again tested positive for plutonium, even though she only performed office duties that day and wasn’t actually exposed to plutonium. She was given a more aggressive decontamination and sent home. One day later when she walked into work she was found to have dangerously high levels of contamination, even expelling contaminated air from her lungs. Her house was also found to have high traces of plutonium in it. After these few incidents Silkwood decided to go public with her evidence of health and safety violations. She contacted a New York Times reporter who agreed to print the story. On her way to meet the reporter her car ran off the road and she died. The documents were never found. The cops ruled the accident a one car accident. Despite this ruling many people suspect that Karen Silkwood was murdered to silence her allegations about the health and safety issues going on in her workplace. These suspicions aren’t based on nothing. Independent investigators inferred that her vehicle...