What was the company doing wrong?

But what was the company doing wrong?

They were doing a government contract and were trying to maximize profit, so they cut some corners.

They were making fuel for a new reactor - each rod assembly is made up of a bunch of pellets normally jacketed in other metals (to avoid reaction with the water in the reactor at high temps).

Karen's crew were making the smallest part of the whole - which looked like sintered/pressed fuel pellets... made by compressing metal powder in a mold.

Plutonium dust isn't actually _as_ hazardous on the skin (in super tiny quantities) as they seem to show. Don't get me wrong, you never want plutonium dust on you, partially because it burns in air, but I'd take that over a drop of nerve gas any day.

Ingestion, on the other hand, is very nasty - since the plutonium is giving off a small but constant amount of ionizing radiation - that means that the particles it's shooting out can knock apart chemical compounds in your cells.

Do it enough times and the cell dies or goes cancerous. Or you kill off your bone marrow.

Inhaling radioactive powder will of course have some serious lung concerns - swallowing would be the entire throat and digestive tract. Plus it behaves as a heavy metal, so there can be toxicity issues alongside the radiation.

The plutonium will create more radiation the more plutonium is stored or held in the same spot, like other radioactive isotopes, so for safety you ideally handle it in very small amounts.

Perhaps to save some money, the company was handling it in larger amounts.

Also, we noticed a lot of issues with the glove box - people getting contaminated, so perhaps the company had ignored installing a more robust replacement for cost reasons, causing more contamination incidents in the process.

Also, some of the tools they used within the glove box may have been "acceptable but outdated" which could cause more stress on the gaskets and glove arms - leading to more risk of contamination.

What was going on with the truck they were pulling apart

They probably cut corners in some other part of processing and the truck was contaminated - they needed to "make it disappear" since they were obviously far too dishonest to report an Incident (as they would have been legally required to).

Was the company purposely contaminating work areas to harm the workers?

No, they were likely just being cheap and causing safety gaps by cutting corners too much.

Once Karen started coming after them, who knows if the security guy may have spiked her with some hot plutonium to try and shut her up (and make her look incompetent)... the movie (and the real facts) certainly seems to imply that they ran her off the road and took the paperwork she had collected.

The only thing I'm 100% sure about

Yes correct - they had to do X-ray photos of each assembly to make sure they were top notch - and their own QA guy was altering records so they could avoid rejecting the defective components. That's SUPER scary, and not cool in any way.

When engineered properly, nuclear fission power is quite safe - but a contractor cutting corners like that is what can make it not safe.

Also when Karen had to stay back to clean up the cake she spilt, how did she get contaminated?

My thought is that despite the company being evil and cutting corners, Karen was probably quite the rebel herself - she may have gotten lazy and skipped a step in the procedure for doing something or other... so she may have initially dosed herself due to her own negligence combined with substandard safety culture/equipment.

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