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In court he showed little enthusiasm. He sat with hands folded, spoke in monotones, invariably addressed his questioner as "Sir." The Silkwood attorney often had to egg him on for details. Nevertheless, his testimony seemed chilling. He told of workmen leaving the plant for lunch in plutonium-laden clothes. The restaurant where they ate was never checked for contamination. Teen-age farm boys, he testified, were put to work with no safety training. Once he and his men were ordered to don coveralls and respirators and work in a contaminated room for several days. They had to meet a production schedule instead of immediately cleaning up the contamination. Smith said his pleas for better equipment went unheard and life became "a continuous battle against leaks." Even the concrete walls were impregnated with plutonium. Smith claimed that to eliminate the plant as a possible source of contamination, "you'd have to break it up and put the whole thing in a nuclear burial ground," a conclusion substantiated by an expert witness, Professor Karl Morgan of Georgia Tech.
Whatever happens to the suit, Jim Smith wants nothing more to do with the Silkwood controversy. "I'm no crusader. I'm not antinuclear," he says. "The trouble is the regulatory people played Keystone Kops and gave licenses to a bunch of dummies who got real sloppy. Now the public is riled up. They've gone against nuclear. And this trial isn't helping."
Plutonium was unknown, Smith points out, until man learned to tinker with the atom. It has strange properties. A quantity of plutonium that is perfectly safe in one container will emit a deadly blast of radiation when put in a container of a different shape. It would be natural to assume that Smith would be happy never to see the stuff again. Not so. He speaks of the substance with something bordering on affection. "Plutonium is weird—and interesting. Every day it's a different challenge because it's temperamental. You can't just relax around it."
His only serious run-in with the deadly metal came when a chunk of it had to be surgically removed from his right thumb. More than a decade later the scar is well worn but still ugly. He could be in great danger from invisible specks of plutonium that may have found their way to his lungs, but he is blunt and fatalistic about it. "I'd go back to plutonium work any day," he says, "but at a first-class No. 1 outfit." With obvious dejection he adds, "After what I did in court, no place is going to give me a job. No place. I consider the nuclear door closed to me."
There are less important but more immediate problems too. Those kidding voices, for instance, that call out in the street, "How much the Silkwoods gonna pay you if they win?" He waves that scarred thumb in the air and yells back, 'I've still got some of that good stuff in there. I'll stick it in your beer. Then you watch how you feel next week."