On September 13, 1987 a "nuclear incident," considered by many to be one of the worst in history, took place in Goiânia, Goiás in Brazil. It began not with a nuclear plant meltdown but with an abandoned medical office. In 1985, The Instituto Goiano de Radioterapia (IGR) moved to a new facility, leaving behind some equipment -- including a thimble sized capsule containing about ten grams of caesium chloride, a highly radioactive substance that was originally used for radiation therapy. The containment canister was made of lead and steel with an iridium window.
While the courts attempted to determine who would be responsible for removing the waste, IGR or the site's owner, the St. Vincent de Paul Conference, an order was given to place the area in lock down. A guard was posted to protect the building and its contents. The owners of IGR wrote to the National Commission for Nuclear Energy, warning them that there were dangers in leaving the equipment in an abandoned facility. Despite being aware of the risks, the court order prevented IGR from removing the materials themselves.
On September 13, 1987, the security guard skipped work and Roberto dos Santos Alves and Wagner Mota Pereira entered the partially demolished building unnoticed, on a scavenging mission to collect material for resale. The two found the teletherapy unit, loaded it in a wheelbarrow and took it home. There they began to disassemble the machine, while gamma radiation slowly escaped through the iridium window. Though they soon became nauseated, they assumed it was caused by something they ate and continued with their project. After several failed attempts to break open the capsule, dos Santos and Pereira finally succeeded. While the glowing blue material inside was interesting, they were far more interested in turning a profit in their endeavor. They would ultimately suffer localized burns, and one would need an arm amputated. But that comes later in the story.
On the 18th, the two sold the parts, including the contents of the capsule, to a scrapyard owned by Devair Alves Ferreira. Amongst the scavenged metal, Ferreira noticed a strange blue glow. Over the next three days he exposed untold numbers to the radiation by inviting his friends and family to see the oddity. One of Ferreira's brothers, Ivo, used the glowing dust to paint a cross on his chest, unknowingly poisoning himself and passing on the contamination to his farm animals, many of which died as a result. Additionally, he spread the dust in a design on the floor of his house, where his daughter played in it, decorating herself with it and showing off her "artwork" to her mother. Meanwhile, at the scrapyard, the lead casing was completely removed and on the 25th, Ferreira sold the material to another scrapyard.
Gabriela Maria Ferreira, Devair's wife, was the first to notice that a large number people had become severely sick nearly simultaneously. She initially suspected that some juice, shared among their guests, was to blame, but testing proved that was not the case. And she could think of only one other coincidental occurrence. So, on September 28, 1987, a full fifteen days after the materials were originally scavenged, Gabriela went to the scrapyard that now held the items and reclaimed them. She placed them in plastic bags and took them to a local hospital. An on duty physician, Paulo Roberto Monteiro, suspected that the material might be dangerous and placed the bag on a chair in the garden to distance it from the patients and staff. Fortunately the plastic bag kept the level of contamination at the hospital to a minimum.
The next morning the concerns were validated when testing confirmed radioactivity. There was an immediate public panic and hospitals were flooded with nearly 130,000 people who feared exposure. Of those, nearly 250 people were found to have radioactive residue on their skin. Of those 250, nearly 20 required treatment. In all, four people died from the radiation: Ivo Ferreira's 6 year old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira; scrap yard workers Israel Baptista dos Santos and Admilson Alves de Souza; and Gabriela Maria Ferreira, herself. Gabriela most likely saved many other lives by reclaiming and turning in the contents of the capsule. Unfortunately she sacrificed herself to those efforts. Such was the public worry over additional exposure that the funeral of young Leide was met with a riot of over 2,000 stick and rock wielding people protesting her burial in a local cemetery. The dead were eventually laid to rest in lead-lined fiberglass coffins to prevent further contamination.
The owners of IGR bore most of the blame for their failure to appropriately track, monitor, contain and dispose of hazardous material, though they were not held legally liable. Their 100,000 Reais fine was because of the condition of the building, not as recompense for the radiation exposure. Instead, a nuclear oversight group was ordered to pay 1.3MM Reais to the victims, their children, and their children's children. Partly due to incidents such as this, in 1990 the International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) was created by the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) to quickly and uniformly classify and communicate the significance of nuclear accidents.
The INES Scale
The recent events in Japan are currently classified as a level 5 (out of 8), although there are indications that one of the reactor incidents may be elevated to a level 6. To put this in perspective, however, the Goiânia Accident is considered a level 5 nuclear incident.
-Professor Walter