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Silkwood v. Kerr-McGee Corp. | 464 U.S. 238 (1984)

In 1983, the United States Supreme Court held that federal law preempted states from regulating safety within the nuclear-power industry. One year later, the Court in Silkwood versus Kerr-McGee Corporation considered whether that same federal preemption applied to a state-law punitive-damages award to a plaintiff contaminated by radiation escaping from a nuclear facility.

Karen Silkwood, a laboratory analyst at Kerr-McGee’s Cimarron plutonium fabricating plant in Oklahoma, discovered that she’d been contaminated with plutonium. Her apartment was also contaminated, and levels were high enough that most of her personal possessions had to be destroyed. Testing revealed contamination inside her body as well. However, Silkwood died in an unrelated automobile accident before the extent of contamination in her internal organs could be determined.

Bill Silkwood, Karen’s father and administrator of her estate, brought a state-law personal-injury lawsuit against Kerr-McGee, invoking the federal court’s diversity jurisdiction. The jury awarded Silkwood half a million dollars for personal injuries, five thousand dollars for property damage, and ten million dollars in punitive damages. The Tenth Circuit held that Oklahoma’s workers’ compensation law precluded the personal-injury award, and that punitive damages were preempted by the federal Atomic Energy Act, which we’ll call the AEA, and the Pacific Gas and Electric decision. The Supreme Court granted Silkwood’s cert petition regarding the punitive-damages award.

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