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5 Unknown Nuclear Disasters: Chernobyl Is Far from the Only One, Chernobyl is not the world’s only nuclear disaster, there are plenty of others to keep you up at night., Interesting Engineering, By  Marcia Wendorf, 2 Aug 19

The Goiânia Accident

In the 1980s, the Instituto Goiano de Radioterapia (IGR) was a private radiotherapy hospital in Goiânia, Brazil. When it moved to a new facility in 1985, a caesium-137-based therapy unit was left behind. The caesium-137 was encased in a shielding canister made of lead and steel.

Legal wrangling prevented the canister from being removed from the facility, and the court posted a security guard to protect the equipment. Unfortunately, that guard was nowhere to be found on September 13, 1987, when two men, Roberto dos Santos Alves and Wagner Mota Pereira, entered the facility and made off with the equipment, placing it in a wheelbarrow and taking it to Alves’s house.

There, they began dismantling the equipment, and both immediately began to vomit. The next day, Pereira noticed a burn on his hand that required the amputation of several fingers.

Alves soldiered on, piercing the canister with a screwdriver. He noticed the blue light of Cherenkov radiation. Alves’s arm ulcerated and had to be amputated, but before that, he sold the items to a scrapyard owned by Devair Alves Ferreira.

Fascinated by the blue glow being emitted, Ferreira carried the items into his house, and over the next three days, he invited his friends and family in to observe the blue glow.

Ferreira’s brother brought some of the caesium to his house where he sprinkled it onto a floor. There, his six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, sat down and ate a sandwich.

Eventually, Ferreira’s wife took the caesium to a hospital, and news of the radioactive leak was broadcast on local media. 250 people were found to be contaminated by radiation, with 129 people having internal contamination.

Four people would die of radiation sickness including six-year-old Leide, Ferreira’s wife Gabriela, 37, and two employees of Ferreira, Israel Baptista dos Santos, 22, and Admilson Alves de Souza, 18.

The Goiânia accident spread significant radioactive contamination throughout the Aeroporto, Central, and Ferroviários districts of Goiânia. Contaminated areas included Alves’s house, Devair Ferreira’s scrapyard which had extremely high levels of radiation, and his brother Ivo’s house.

The “NATO Science for Peace and Security Series” bizarrely found radioactive contamination on:
* Three buses
* 42 houses
* Fourteen cars
* Five pigs
* 50,000 rolls of toilet paper.

The Goiânia accident ranks as a number 5 on the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale. A 1990 film about the disaster won several awards at the 1990 Festival de Brasília film festival, and a 1994 episode of the TV series “Star Trek: The Next Generation,” “Thine Own Self,” was inspired by the Goiânia accident. …. https://interestingengineering.com/5-unknown-nuclear-disasters-chernobyl-is-far-from-the-only-one