Daily MOS: The Goiânia Accident

When we think of nuclear materials, our minds go straight to two things: extraordinarily terrifying explosive devices and accidentally ending the Soviet Union through gross incompetence.

There are other uses for radioactive materials though. Various pieces of laboratory equipment, your smoke alarm, and of course, radiation treatment for cancer are all ways the more feisty elements are used safely.

Well, mostly.

Today’s Moment of Science… The Goiânia accident.

Cesium-137 is useful for a small handful of neat applications, the primary one we’re generally familiar with being radiation therapy for cancer. Too much can give you a miserable day fairly easily, but for therapeutic purposes the dose of cesium is tightly controlled and delivered to the exact spot in the body where the chunk of cancery nonsense needs to be obliterated.

The Instituto Goiânio de Radioterapia (IGR), a private radiotherapy institute in Goiânia, Brazil, had moved in 1985 to new premises and largely abandoned the old building. There was a legal dispute between the owners of the IGR and the owners of the building, the Catholic organization St. Vincent de Paul. By 1986, litigation revealed to the courts that a chunk of highly radioactive cesium was hiding out in the old facility. The court’s solution was to park a security guard in front of the place to protect the expensive machinery with radioactive elements, which inspires a shallow depth of confidence.

In May of 1987, one of the IGR owners warned the organization holding the building hostage that they would be responsible “for what would happen with the caesium bomb” in their possession.

This was a year after Chernobyl, so it’s not like society as a whole had any, uh, major recent indication that something could go wrong when you neglect to properly manage nuclear bullshit.

On September 13, 1987, the old IGR facility’s security guard took a sick day. Which gave two randos, Roberto dos Santos Alves and Wagner Mota Pereira, the opportunity to break in and salvage the institute for parts. They just happened to stumble across the radiotherapy unit, partially disassembling it, and dragging home the source assembly in a wheelbarrow.

They just hoped their find was valuable.

They got to Alves’ place and started taking it apart. They freed the cesium capsule, and a few days later Alves managed to puncture it with a screwdriver, scooping out some cesium. A mysterious blue light came from the stuff, and at first they thought it might be a type of gunpowder. Fairly quickly, the men exhibited signs of radiation poisoning, both experiencing severe vomiting the first night. Pereira’s hand started to swell. When he first went for medical treatment, they diagnosed him with some type of food poisoning.

Pereira eventually underwent partial amputation of several fingers. Alves’ exposure was more severe, and he needed an arm amputated.

Alves was still oblivious to what they’d unearthed, and sold the parts to a junkyard a few days later. The junkyard owner, Devair Alves Ferreira, noticed this glowing blue bullshit poking out of the capsule. He and a friend worked the cesium out of the capsule just in case it was supernatural, as you do. They kept some and gave some to friends and family, selling the rest to another scrapyard. Devair’s brother Ivo brought some home and his young daughter Leide was enchanted with the glowing dust. She covered herself in it. She sat on the floor that Ivo had spread the cesium on, even eating off of it.

Devair’s wife, Gabriela Maria, put together that everyone got sick around the same time. On September 29th, she retrieved the source from the other scrapyard, turning it into authorities.

There were a total of four fatalities. Two of Ferreira’s employees, Admilson Alves de Souza and Israel Baptista dos Santos, his wife, and Ivo’s daughter Leide died of acute radiation poisoning. Almost incomprehensibly, Ferreira survived despite receiving a higher dose than all of them.

Over 100,000 people were examined for possible radiation exposure. 249 were found to have been exposed. 54 were diagnosed with severe contamination and 28 suffered various radiation burns and injuries. The $20 million clean-up effort included topsoil removal from contaminated sites, demolishing seven houses where contamination was through the roof, and doing everything possible to scrub the cesium dust from places that were salvageable.

Even after the clean up, the accident hung over the place for years. Tourism in the area largely fell apart and neighboring communities stopped purchasing agricultural products from the region. Nobody wanted to fuck with the place with the supernatural dust that killed people.

All of this was caused by a mere 93 grams of the cesium-137.

This has been your daily Moment of Science, asking who do you blame for all of this?

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