My favorite reason someone has ever given for why a nuclear accident wasn’t their fault? “I didn’t know it was radioactive.”
In this one case, it’s possible they’re not entirely wrong.
Today’s Moment of Science… the Juarez Cobalt-60 Disaster
In 1977, the Centro Médico de Especialidades in Juarez, Mexico procured a used Picker-3000 radiotherapy unit from a medical equipment company in Texas. It had a cobalt-60 radioactive source and was used in the treatment of some cancers.There were a few small problems, chief amongst them being they had no specialist to run the equipment and no license to receive radioactive materials.
The cobalt bomb sat waiting, collecting dust in the facility’s storage warehouse.
How hospital electrician Vicente Sotelo and his friend Ricardo Hernandez came to procure the heart of a nuclear beast looks different from each vantage point. Maybe someone’s lying, maybe someone misunderstood, maybe someone forgot. Perhaps the conversations had felt so inconsequential that by the time there were consequences in 1984, why would they have remembered what they told the maintenance guy to do early December in 1983?
Hell, the only reason anyone’s really sure of the date is that beginning December 6th, all the paperwork at the junkyard was radioactive.
By some reporting, Sotelo just decided to sell it for scrap metal and it was theft, but it’s also been reported that he sought and was given permission to take the materials. In other accounts, Sotelo has said he was told by supervisors to get certain materials from hospital storage to dispose of. It remains unclear if he was stealing, taking with permission, or conducting hospital business.
Regardless, Sotelo has fairly pointed out that there are no markings on this ancient equipment that clearly denote ‘this canister will fry your huevos.’ If you were wondering why it made a difference whether or not they were licensed to receive radioactive materials, places with licenses typically slap a label on their nuclear bullshit.
So when he and Hernandez plucked the tungsten capsule with about 6,000 pellets of cobalt-60 out of this beast, they just tossed it into the back of Sotelo’s truck. Because it’s not like it was fragile or dangerous, right?
A quick word about cobalt-60.
When radiation started being used in cancer therapy, they were using naturally radioactive isotopes like radium, but there was an incredibly limited, absurdly expensive supply of the stuff available for radiotherapy. Cobalt-59 is much more abundant, and when you bombard it with neutrons in a nuclear reactor you make yourself some temperamental cobalt-60 that sheds gamma rays annoyingly efficiently.
It’s likely that a bomb with cobalt-60 would be far worse than a standard nuke because cobalt would not be used in the reaction, no. It would be used to salt the earth, continuing to emit deadly gamma rays across land for years to come.
Cobalt pellets were scattered all over Sotelo’s truck bed.
He sold the container to a local junkyard for $9. Which is about when things took a turn.
Estimates vary, but from the junkyard, 20,000 tons of steel was believed to have become grossly contaminated with cobalt, up to 1,000 tons of which made its way north to the US. It took until January 17 for a delivery truck passing by Los Alamos National Laboratory triggering its radiation alarms before anyone knew there were nuclear breadcrumbs leading back to Juarez.
While clean-up was manageable in the US, it’s been much harder in Mexico. About two hundred workers were hired to clean the streets of any cobalt contamination in Juarez; they were given brooms and no protective equipment. It’s been estimated that only 5,000 out of 19,000 tons of hot steel was cleaned up in Mexico. There’s ‘rumored’ to be an entire mall built from contaminated materials. Emblematic of the story, Sotelo’s truck had sat in front of the house for about two months, emitting imperials assloads of gamma radiation through the neighborhood. It was towed away, but rather than make this fuckery any safer they put a fence around it in the middle of the town square. So.
Over a hundred houses were condemned. That leaves potentially untold hundreds more built with steel flush with gamma rays, causing who knows what for long term health effects in the country. There have been reports of low sperm counts and chromosomal damage, and some junkyard workers and several of Sotelo’s neighbors were exposed to high doses of radiation.
But somehow Sotelo, who had nothing short of a heroic dose of radiation, was fine. For strolling through what’s likely Mexico’s biggest nuclear disaster unscathed, he earned himself the moniker, ‘the Bionic Man.’
This has been your Moment of Science, just throwing it out there that regulations aren’t the devil if following them means throwing a fucking ‘radioactivity’ warning label on your nuclear bullshit.
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