Kerr McGee Cimarron Plant, Oklahoma

This plant, located in north central Oklahoma, once made plutonium pellets for nuclear reactor fuel rods. It is famous as the site where Karen Silkwood worked and was exposed to radiation that threatened her life. She gathered what she said was evidence of corporate wrong-doing at the plant, including the possibility that she, an outspoken activist for workers at the plant, was being intentionally poisoned with radiation. In November 1974, she was on her way to a meeting with a reporter from the New York Times, when her car veered off the road and crashed into a culvert, killing her. Suspicions of foul play abounded, and Silkwood, a film made in 1983 about her, supported them. Kerr-McGee closed its nuclear fuel plants in 1975, and this one was officially decontaminated and shuttered in 1994. Some of the buildings remain, but nobody works on-site.