There are so many movies about whistle blowers because they’re the closest thing we have to real-life superheroes. They’re smart enough to see a problem, brave enough to do something about it, usually suffer for speaking out, and must have succeeded if their story’s interesting enough to make a movie about them. Karen Silkwood , played by Meryl Streep, works at the only major employer in her small Oklahoma town, a factory making plutonium fuel rods for a nuclear power plant.