Goiânia caesium-137 accident

The Instituto Goiano de Radioterapia, a private clinic, moved in 1985 and left behind a teletherapy unit with a caesium-137 chloride source. On 13 September 1987 two men entered the half-demolished building, took the head of the machine away and opened it; on the 18th they sold it to a scrapyard. The owner, drawn by the blue glow of the powder, took it home and shared it with relatives and acquaintances.

On 28 September the scrap dealer's wife, seeing many people around her fall ill, carried the pieces to a hospital; the next day a physicist confirmed the radioactivity. About 112,000 people were screened: 249 were contaminated, 46 received treatment and four died of acute radiation syndrome (Clemons and Blumenberg 2023).

In the cleanup, topsoil was removed at several spots and several houses were demolished; surfaces and floors were treated with acid and Prussian blue mixtures, the latter also used as a drug for contaminated people. The waste was taken out of the city to Abadia de Goiás, where the final repository stands. Contaminated recycling material had also reached paper mills in São Paulo state: those paper bales are kept in fifty 1.6 m³ steel boxes at IPEN in São Paulo (Tessaro et al. 2023).

In 2000 the federal court of Goiás ordered the nuclear commission CNEN and other defendants to pay compensation and to guarantee medical and psychological care for the victims and their descendants (Wikipedia).