Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee.

A divorced mother of three, Karen Silkwood (1946-1974) began working at the Kerr-McGee Corporation’s new nuclear reactor fuel-rod processing plant near Crescent, Oklahoma, in August, 1972. There, she helped to produce plutonium pellets. Among the tasks she performed in the plant’s metallography laboratory were quality-control checks on plutonium pellets that she held up to unexposed X-ray film. Pellets in which plutonium was distributed evenly throughout produced no “hot spots” on the film and passed the quality-control checks. Silkwood also polished fuel-rod welds to check for cracks and inclusions.