:rofl:
Who's Karen Silkwood?
Silkwood was a union activist who worked at the Kerr-McGee nuclear plant in Oklahoma. She discovered that they were knowingly making faulty rods for reactors, so she turned whistleblower. She also spearheaded a strike some years earlier, so she definitely was not popular with management.
Someone rigged it up so that she got contaminated, (which wasn't hard to do at that place, since a lot of the protective gear was old, shoddy and had leaks) As a result, she had to get one of those lovely decontamination showers where several people in hazmat suits put you under scalding hot water and scrub the hell out of you with stiff brushes. They are basically trying to peel off the radioactive layers of the epidermis. It's a bit on the painful side.
There is a lot of speculation regarding her death. She was on her way to talk to a reporter from the New York Times to expose what had been happening at the plant. They found the car totaled and her dead inside. Most people think that she was murdered.
Anyway, there was a movie about it (titled Silkwood). Meryl Streep played Karen, and Cher played Dolly, her lesbian roommate. Craig T. Nelson was her corrupt supervisor, and Kurt Russel played her boyfriend. I don't remember who everyone else was. I think that was probably the first time I ever saw Cher act, and I was like "Holy fucking shit, she's good." It was also one of the first truly adult movies I had seen, and it quickly became my favorite. (I was 13 when it came out.) There is some really tense, scary stuff in there. Especially the decontamination scenes.
