Radioactive Fallout

We are in a War - Part 22

I was recently watching a programme about the radiation disaster in Goiânia, Brazil in 1987 - Radiation Emergency. Two thieves had found their way in to a disused cancer treatment clinic and found a piece of the machinery used for radiotherapy. They wanted to salvage the machinery for its lead content and sell it on to a scrap yard. Somehow they managed to dismantle the machinery, and sold it in two parts to the scrap dealer. The dealer noticed that there was a powder in it which glowed with a blue luminescence when the lights were turned out. The powder was situated in the core of the lead capsule. He had decided to take this core home with him to show his family, not understanding what it was. He poured some of this powder out of the core on to the kitchen table so the family could touch and marvel at it’s seemingly magical properties. Children and adults handled the powder. The scrap owner even rubbed some of the powder on to the neck of his wife like glitter. After a day or so they started to become unwell. They were vomiting frequently and noticeably losing hair. They felt dreadful.

It was only when a member of the family decided to try and find out what the core was by taking it to a local hospital, that the alarm was raised. By now the core had been in various places, the abandoned treatment clinic, the scrap yard, the scrap merchant’s house and the hospital. A physicist who was visiting the area realised that the core and its contents were radioactive and put in a call to a professor at the Brazilian Nuclear Energy Commission or CNEN.

Then ensued a hunt for the source of the radioactive material and a complex tracking and tracing exercise so the physicists could identify all the areas and the people that had been contaminated. Those who had skin contact with the radioactive material started to develop burn-like lesions and the symptoms of serious radiation exposure. Four people eventually died from their radiation exposure, while 249 were contaminated with Caesium 137. This is one of the isotopes in the Uranium chain and it has a half life of around 30 years.