14 ms·

The Goiânia Accident (1987)

205 points by warent 5y ago

smudgy 5y ago
One of my a ex-girlfriend's mother was one of the doctors that tended to some of the sick. She didn't like to talk about it, saying the movie covered what she saw but, ~20 years later (at the time we were dating) she didn't like to remember what she went through. I vividly remember her talking about it because she tried to end the conversation with a joke ("don't poke holes in stuff") that didn't land but I had a polite chuckle to move on.
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  That's really interesting. I've always wondered what those doctors went through. Radiation exposure must have been so far down the list of likely diagnoses...
  - augusto-moura 5y ago
    From a person not much involved with it, but from the same city. For a short period, there was a massive fear around it, and the risk of mass contamination was in the population day to day talk. You see, the Goiânia incident was almost a year and a half after the Chernobyl incident, which just made the situation worse. As soon as the tests came back and most of the population was ok, most of the fear in the people and medical professionals alike began to fade away. After that, most of our worries began to switch into waste management and what to make with all the soil and things that were contaminated in the process
- highhedgehog 5y ago
  What's the movie?
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    > Césio 137 - O Pesadelo de Goiânia > Cesium 137 - The Nightmare of Goiânia
virgilp 5y ago
Why were people from IGR found to be at fault at all? From Wikipedia, it sounds so backwards... like, one of the owners seems to have done everything possible to recoup the radioactive material & warn of the dangers. There's not a word about anything happening to those who prevented the recuperation of radioactive material, only to later fail to guard it. And thieves are only mentioned to say they were not included as defendants.
- namdnay 5y ago
  Probably because the people who stopped them from retrieving the material were better connected politically... I agree that there's something very fishy in the story
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- simonh 5y ago
  IGR shouldn't have left the source behind in the first place, but yes beyond that mistake they seem to have done everything they could to get the source secured. They were only penalised for a peripheral issue, the dilapidated state of the building. Presumably the theory is they should not have left the source in a building in that condition, which contributed to the thieves being able to take it.
  - 08-15 5y ago
    From https://web.archive.org/web/20140503013539/http://noticias.juridicas.com/articulos/00-Generalidades/200602-325612711062370.html https://web.archive.org/web/20140503013539/http://noticias.j... by way of Google translation: "Meanwhile, the ownership of the clinic's assets was being discussed in court, and the cobalt 60 teletherapy unit was moved to the new facilities and the cesium 137 teletherapy unit was abandoned in its original place due to being seized." Sounds like the root cause was stupid bureaucrats, but that must of course not be admitted in public.
    - simonh 5y ago
rozularen 5y ago
would never expect to see this incident from my hometown in the front page of HN...
- yitchelle 5y ago
  Hopefully, the next time will be due to a more positive story.
emersonrsantos 5y ago
There's a film about it called "Césio 137 - O Pesadelo de Goiânia", in Portuguese.
janandonly 5y ago
Interesting how it is often greed (by the rich and poor both) that create te biggest of our natural disasters and other problems...
- easytiger 5y ago
  Yes. If only humans had no motivation to exist and survive the world could avoid all its problems. The NeoTeds are becoming increasingly common in public discourse I've noticed. The damn industrial revolution and it's consequences.
  - marcellus23 5y ago
    Pretty wild to jump from “greed is bad” to Ted Kaczynski.
    - dang 5y ago
      Sure, but please "don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
      - marcellus23 5y ago
        I guess I didn't think the comment broke the guidelines, just that the jump in logic was a bit ridiculous. In the future I'll do that.
  - noduerme 5y ago
    I've broken into plenty of off limits post-industrial wasteland sites in my life, but in my will to exist and survive, wasn't stupid enough to pry open any radioactive sources. The worst that happened was a friend who had an obsession with watching the green flash when smashing flourescent lights. I told him it was bad for him to be breathing that shit. No, I don't think I'm out of line speaking for people from third world countries here, those people were thieving idiots who wanted money more than they cared about survival or the health and safety of their family. Somehow, most people exist and survive without thieving. But NeoTrots love to act as if theft, even incredibly dumb and self-harmful theft, is some necessary and noble act.
noduerme 5y ago
This might sound callous, but literally everyone in the chain of theft here deserved what was coming to them except for the six year old girl. If you receive a stolen item that glows and you think has supernatural powers, please eat it yourself instead of THROWING IT ON THE FLOOR FOR YOUR SIX YEAR OLD DAUGHTER TO PLAY WITH. Dying later of alcoholism is no penance. [edit] go on, explain the flag.
roenxi 5y ago
One of the world's "worst nuclear disasters" according to Time magazine. Still remarkably minor. This isn't even strong evidence of lax safety standards.
- MattGaiser 5y ago
  > International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called it "one of the world's worst radiological incidents". The IAEA also characterizes it that way. They consider it one of the 7 worst accidents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sc...
pixelpoet 5y ago
Some of the most incredible technical reporting I've ever read are the IAEA accident reports: https://www.iaea.org/topics/accident-reports https://www.iaea.org/topics/accident-reports Be warned that some include pretty gruesome medical photos of people who got severely irradiated.
- carrolldunham 5y ago
  note that this link is to a page where you can order a print book
  - pixelpoet 5y ago
    There are PDF downloads on each incident's page.
lqet 5y ago
This is a spooky read: > On September 16, Alves succeeded in puncturing the capsule's aperture window with a screwdriver, allowing him to see a deep blue light coming from the tiny opening he had created. He inserted the screwdriver and successfully scooped out some of the glowing substance. Thinking it was perhaps a type of gunpowder, he tried to light it, but the powder would not ignite. [...] On September 18, Alves sold the items to a nearby scrapyard. That night, Devair Alves Ferreira, the owner of the scrapyard, noticed the blue glow from the punctured capsule. Thinking the capsule's contents were valuable or even supernatural, he immediately brought it into his house. Over the next three days, he invited friends and family to view the strange glowing substance. On September 21, at the scrapyard, one of Ferreira's friends succeeded in freeing several rice-sized grains of the glowing material from the capsule using a screwdriver. Ferreira began to share some of them with various friends and family members. > The day before the sale to the third scrapyard, on September 24, Ivo, Devair's brother, successfully scraped some additional dust out of the source and took it to his house a short distance away. There he spread some of it on the concrete floor. His six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, later ate an egg while sitting on this floor. She was also fascinated by the blue glow of the powder, applying it to her body and showing it off to her mother. Dust from the powder fell on the egg she was consuming; she eventually absorbed 1.0 GBq and received a total dose of 6.0 Gy, more than a fatal dose even with treatment. [...] She was buried in a common cemetery in Goiânia, in a special fiberglass coffin lined with lead to prevent the spread of radiation. Despite these measures, news of her impending burial caused a riot of more than 2,000 people in the cemetery on the day of her burial, all fearing that her corpse would poison the surrounding land.
- cranekam 5y ago
  It is a staggering read for sure. It's heartbreaking to imagine that little girl playing with something she thinks is a toy without knowing it is silently killing her. It's easy to think the victims were stupid for playing with a weird glowing material but these are likely uneducated people who're just trying to get by. That they were able to run into such a dangerous substance is a tragedy.
- moffkalast 5y ago
  > Devair Ferreira himself survived despite receiving 7 Gy of radiation. He died in 1994 of cirrhosis aggravated by depression and binge drinking. I'd be binge drinking too if some invisible dust killed my entire family.
an1sotropy 5y ago
Kyle Hill on youtube has made a great (and heart-breaking) video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3NJXGSIIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3NJXGSIIA
- dredmorbius 5y ago
  Excellent and recommended.
rudian 5y ago
The events section reads like a horror story. I can’t imagine what that poor daughter could have gone through.
TheGigaChad 5y ago
Brown people, not very smart.
occz 5y ago
The podcast Well There's Your Problem has an episode covering this incident: https://youtu.be/34rdxDgpaaA https://youtu.be/34rdxDgpaaA As it turns out, when you have highly radioactive stuff in your buildings, you should probably clean that radioactive stuff out when abandoning said building.
- RNCTX 5y ago
  Love that podcast, surprised it took as long as it did for someone to apply the concept of the Klaus forklift safety video to a podcast, lol.
- blankton 5y ago
  A german Podcast from Historians regarding this incident: https://www.geschichte.fm/archiv/gag318/ https://www.geschichte.fm/archiv/gag318/
dTal 5y ago
I come back to these sorts of incidents when the topic of warning future generations away from nuclear waste comes up - e.g. "This is not a place of honor" etc. We can't even reliably warn people away now, when we know their language and have internationally recognized symbols for radiation.
- kergonath 5y ago
  This is far from unique to nuclear materials. In the news today there was an explosion of a tanker truck full of petrol, which killed ~100 people. We cannot reliably warn people away from anything, and yet some industries are safer than others. Applying this standard we’d have run away from petrol a long, long time ago. IOW, the standards you seem to use are unrealistic, and unevenly applied. This really isn’t against you: this exact line of reasoning is quite common and demonstrates that we are terrible at risk management.
  - dTal 5y ago
    You seem to be arguing against something I never said, specifically a version of my comment with "and therefore we shouldn't use nuclear power" appended.
- jrootabega 5y ago
  The sad/inspiring truth about the human condition is that no warnings will be guaranteed to: - convey the danger factually - make people believe or care about it - discourage young/stupid/intoxicated/reckless/nihilistic people - discourage smart people who are intrigued by the danger and will be compelled to explore as much of it as they can - discourage angry people who want to bring the danger to their enemies.
- Cthulhu_ 5y ago
  It seems curiosity always beats warnings about danger. I mean the curses and the sealing and the like of entering Tutankhamun's tomb were ignored as well. And I'm pretty sure that this container would have the nuclear symbol on it. The best thing to do I think is to make sure nobody can even accidentally find it. Drill a deep hole (miles) where you know it won't end up in the earth's mantle while the material is still dangerous, fill it with nuclear waste, seal it and forget about it. The chances of someone accidentally finding it again thousands of years down the line are minimal. Warnings only make people more curious. I don't remember any warning sign from >1000 years ago that actually keep people away.
sneak 5y ago
This is one of my favorite pages on Wikipedia.
lordnacho 5y ago
I don't quite understand how it's worthwhile to poke a 5cm cylinder to get the scrap metal? Why not just throw it in the pile with everything else? What would a normal hunk of steel be worth?
- kragen 5y ago
  A normal hunk of steel is worth almost nothing. Most recyclers won't even take it (real recyclers, the kind that pay you for your materials, not fraudulent "recyclers" set up for public relations value). Lead, aluminum, brass, copper, silver, and gold go for much higher prices. Copper is common in heavy steel things.
- kergonath 5y ago
  You can find all sorts of valuable things in things that look sciency like this. Like platinum bits and pieces. He was probably hoping to find something else than steel. Glowing stuff can also be very expensive, but you need to know people who might be interested, and they usually aren’t the best company. Also, proper equipment to manipulate it.
- gallego2007 5y ago
  You have to put yourself in the shoes of someone trying to get by… in a developing country no less…
  - matheusmoreira 5y ago
    Yeah. My father and grandfather used to work in junkyards like these. If some strange glowing material showed up in a scrapyard, I have no doubt they'd think it was valuable.
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- queuebert 5y ago
  Cesium is much denser than steel, so it probably felt valuable or rare.
derjames 5y ago
This reminds me about the Juarez incident. https://culturacolectiva.com/history/cobalt-60-ciudad-juarez-mexico-nuclear-accident https://culturacolectiva.com/history/cobalt-60-ciudad-juarez...
- queuebert 5y ago
  That article talks about an "engine head" of Co-60. That's not a correct translation. The radiotherapy unit has a Co-60 source in it, and it is called a "head", but there is no engine. You just open the doors and shine the source onto a patient for a carefully calculated number of seconds, then shut the doors. It works in an almost identical way to the Cs-137 source from above.
Trufa 5y ago
For those who can speak spanish, there's a song about it from a Uruguayan duo you might enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YIalaC0M_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YIalaC0M_A
xhrpost 5y ago
What would be the point of incinerating contaminated material? This isn't a biological threat like bacteria or poison in which case the chemical alteration of the substance through fire negates the threat. Wouldn't the radioactivity remain either in ash or fumes?
- singlow 5y ago
  I assume that the radioactivity is dispersed enough to not be a concern. Leaving the objects whole would have risked them being found and used/recycled.
m0llusk 5y ago
It seems strange that this Wikipedia page keeps getting posted on HN. It is kind of an interesting event, but what exactly is the point of bringing it up over and over? If it is that important then wouldn't it make more sense to write just a little bit about the context and how it relates to modern products and practices which have changed in the following decades?
- warent 5y ago
  I posted this article. I was reading about Brazil on Wikipedia and the rabbit hole brought me to this article which blew my mind. I was surprised I'd never heard about it before, and wanted to share with the community because it seemed likely others would find it interesting as well. That turned out to be true (plus I think @dang boosted the article to help it get attention) HN isn't just about entrepreneurship. It's really about any kind of cerebral topic. Anyway, it is STEM related which is a significant part of HN.
  - m0llusk 5y ago
    That is all valid and good, but I would suggest that in order to make HN as good as it can be it might be worth searching for a link before posting it. Even if posting the link is still the right thing to do this offers the potential of reflecting on the dozens of past threads in order to understand more. I used the HN search feature on this title and found around over a dozen previous threads many of which were small yet interesting.
    - warent 5y ago
      HN has a built-in duplication checker that automatically redirects to the most recent submission of an article within a certain time. If it isn't working properly then Dan would update it, or mark as [Dupe] let the community member know to stop. Having new conversations about old topics is a normal part of communication between humans. Search shows this article is posted on average once per year which is hardly beating a dead horse on old exhausted discussions. I'm sensing there are reasons beneath the surface of why this is affecting you so deeply.
stalfosknight 5y ago
I don't understand why people thought it was a good idea to crack open medical equipment with radiation symbols on it and play with the stuff they found inside.
- HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
  Because not everyone has the education to know that it's dangerous. If you left school at age 12 to support your family (assuming you made it that far), it's not likely that you'd know what the symbol even means.
ratww 5y ago
If anyone else is interested in more information about the case, this is the best properly sourced article I could find. It's in portuguese but translation works well. http://mapadeconflitos.ensp.fiocruz.br/conflito/go-vitimas-do-cesio-137-ate-hoje-lutam-pelo-reconhecimento-pleno-de-seus-direitos/ http://mapadeconflitos.ensp.fiocruz.br/conflito/go-vitimas-d...
no1lives4ever 5y ago
In 2010 Delhi University sold a not in use Gammacell 220 research irradiator to a scrap dealer that was in the local news for a few days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayapuri#2010_Mayapuri_radiological_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayapuri#2010_Mayapuri_radiolo...
fmakunbound 5y ago
> 50,000 rolls of toilet paper [contaminated] What happened there I wonder.
itronitron 5y ago
More recently (2019) in Seattle... The International Isotopes team sawed into the holder for the source, which otherwise would not have fit into the transport vessel, but then cut into the source itself. That released about 2,900 curies of the material, contaminating 13 people and all seven floors of the facility, according to DOE’s March 30 report on the accident. https://www.exchangemonitor.com/seattle-cesium-spill-clean-year-nnsa-nonproliferation-chief-says/ https://www.exchangemonitor.com/seattle-cesium-spill-clean-y...
- lqet 5y ago
  One of my favorite nuclear incidents (although uncritical): in 2014, it was discovered that workers in the Swiss nuclear plant Leibstadt drilled several holes [0] into the primary containment to install a fire extinguisher [1]. [0] https://www.saldo.ch/fileadmin/content/files/artikel/2016/woWAQz.png https://www.saldo.ch/fileadmin/content/files/artikel/2016/wo... [1] https://www.ensi.ch/de/2014/11/05/kkl-beschaedigungen-am-primaercontainment-vom-24-juni-2014/ https://www.ensi.ch/de/2014/11/05/kkl-beschaedigungen-am-pri...
  - connordoner 5y ago
    Talk about a bad day at work, huh?!
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - iSnow 5y ago
    It went unnoticed for 6y too. I can only imagine the ruckus it caused in 2014 during the inspection.
    - ethbr0 5y ago
      It's things like that, and the watch standers and damage control officers of the Bonhomme Richard, that make you blink about rarely-used safety organizations. If you're not auditing your rare-action groups adherence to standards via indepdent, out-of-chain assessment, assume they're hopelessly broken.

205 points by warent 5y ago

One of my a ex-girlfriend's mother was one of the doctors that tended to some of the sick. She didn't like to talk about it, saying the movie covered what she saw but, ~20 years later (at the time we were dating) she didn't like to remember what she went through. I vividly remember her talking about it because she tried to end the conversation with a joke ("don't poke holes in stuff") that didn't land but I had a polite chuckle to move on.

matheusmoreira 5y ago
That's really interesting. I've always wondered what those doctors went through. Radiation exposure must have been so far down the list of likely diagnoses...
- augusto-moura 5y ago
  From a person not much involved with it, but from the same city. For a short period, there was a massive fear around it, and the risk of mass contamination was in the population day to day talk. You see, the Goiânia incident was almost a year and a half after the Chernobyl incident, which just made the situation worse. As soon as the tests came back and most of the population was ok, most of the fear in the people and medical professionals alike began to fade away. After that, most of our worries began to switch into waste management and what to make with all the soil and things that were contaminated in the process
highhedgehog 5y ago
What's the movie?
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  > Césio 137 - O Pesadelo de Goiânia > Cesium 137 - The Nightmare of Goiânia

virgilp 5y ago

Why were people from IGR found to be at fault at all? From Wikipedia, it sounds so backwards... like, one of the owners seems to have done everything possible to recoup the radioactive material & warn of the dangers. There's not a word about anything happening to those who prevented the recuperation of radioactive material, only to later fail to guard it. And thieves are only mentioned to say they were not included as defendants.

namdnay 5y ago
Probably because the people who stopped them from retrieving the material were better connected politically... I agree that there's something very fishy in the story
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
simonh 5y ago
IGR shouldn't have left the source behind in the first place, but yes beyond that mistake they seem to have done everything they could to get the source secured. They were only penalised for a peripheral issue, the dilapidated state of the building. Presumably the theory is they should not have left the source in a building in that condition, which contributed to the thieves being able to take it.
- 08-15 5y ago
  From https://web.archive.org/web/20140503013539/http://noticias.juridicas.com/articulos/00-Generalidades/200602-325612711062370.html https://web.archive.org/web/20140503013539/http://noticias.j... by way of Google translation: "Meanwhile, the ownership of the clinic's assets was being discussed in court, and the cobalt 60 teletherapy unit was moved to the new facilities and the cesium 137 teletherapy unit was abandoned in its original place due to being seized." Sounds like the root cause was stupid bureaucrats, but that must of course not be admitted in public.
  - simonh 5y ago

rozularen 5y ago

would never expect to see this incident from my hometown in the front page of HN...

yitchelle 5y ago
Hopefully, the next time will be due to a more positive story.

emersonrsantos 5y ago

There's a film about it called "Césio 137 - O Pesadelo de Goiânia", in Portuguese.

janandonly 5y ago

Interesting how it is often greed (by the rich and poor both) that create te biggest of our natural disasters and other problems...

easytiger 5y ago
Yes. If only humans had no motivation to exist and survive the world could avoid all its problems. The NeoTeds are becoming increasingly common in public discourse I've noticed. The damn industrial revolution and it's consequences.
- marcellus23 5y ago
  Pretty wild to jump from “greed is bad” to Ted Kaczynski.
  - dang 5y ago
    Sure, but please "don't feed egregious comments by replying; flag them instead." https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
    - marcellus23 5y ago
      I guess I didn't think the comment broke the guidelines, just that the jump in logic was a bit ridiculous. In the future I'll do that.
- noduerme 5y ago
  I've broken into plenty of off limits post-industrial wasteland sites in my life, but in my will to exist and survive, wasn't stupid enough to pry open any radioactive sources. The worst that happened was a friend who had an obsession with watching the green flash when smashing flourescent lights. I told him it was bad for him to be breathing that shit. No, I don't think I'm out of line speaking for people from third world countries here, those people were thieving idiots who wanted money more than they cared about survival or the health and safety of their family. Somehow, most people exist and survive without thieving. But NeoTrots love to act as if theft, even incredibly dumb and self-harmful theft, is some necessary and noble act.

noduerme 5y ago

This might sound callous, but literally everyone in the chain of theft here deserved what was coming to them except for the six year old girl. If you receive a stolen item that glows and you think has supernatural powers, please eat it yourself instead of THROWING IT ON THE FLOOR FOR YOUR SIX YEAR OLD DAUGHTER TO PLAY WITH. Dying later of alcoholism is no penance. [edit] go on, explain the flag.

roenxi 5y ago

One of the world's "worst nuclear disasters" according to Time magazine. Still remarkably minor. This isn't even strong evidence of lax safety standards.

MattGaiser 5y ago
> International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) called it "one of the world's worst radiological incidents". The IAEA also characterizes it that way. They consider it one of the 7 worst accidents. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Scale https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Nuclear_Event_Sc...

pixelpoet 5y ago

Some of the most incredible technical reporting I've ever read are the IAEA accident reports: https://www.iaea.org/topics/accident-reports https://www.iaea.org/topics/accident-reports Be warned that some include pretty gruesome medical photos of people who got severely irradiated.

carrolldunham 5y ago
note that this link is to a page where you can order a print book
- pixelpoet 5y ago
  There are PDF downloads on each incident's page.

lqet 5y ago

This is a spooky read: > On September 16, Alves succeeded in puncturing the capsule's aperture window with a screwdriver, allowing him to see a deep blue light coming from the tiny opening he had created. He inserted the screwdriver and successfully scooped out some of the glowing substance. Thinking it was perhaps a type of gunpowder, he tried to light it, but the powder would not ignite. [...] On September 18, Alves sold the items to a nearby scrapyard. That night, Devair Alves Ferreira, the owner of the scrapyard, noticed the blue glow from the punctured capsule. Thinking the capsule's contents were valuable or even supernatural, he immediately brought it into his house. Over the next three days, he invited friends and family to view the strange glowing substance. On September 21, at the scrapyard, one of Ferreira's friends succeeded in freeing several rice-sized grains of the glowing material from the capsule using a screwdriver. Ferreira began to share some of them with various friends and family members. > The day before the sale to the third scrapyard, on September 24, Ivo, Devair's brother, successfully scraped some additional dust out of the source and took it to his house a short distance away. There he spread some of it on the concrete floor. His six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, later ate an egg while sitting on this floor. She was also fascinated by the blue glow of the powder, applying it to her body and showing it off to her mother. Dust from the powder fell on the egg she was consuming; she eventually absorbed 1.0 GBq and received a total dose of 6.0 Gy, more than a fatal dose even with treatment. [...] She was buried in a common cemetery in Goiânia, in a special fiberglass coffin lined with lead to prevent the spread of radiation. Despite these measures, news of her impending burial caused a riot of more than 2,000 people in the cemetery on the day of her burial, all fearing that her corpse would poison the surrounding land.

cranekam 5y ago
It is a staggering read for sure. It's heartbreaking to imagine that little girl playing with something she thinks is a toy without knowing it is silently killing her. It's easy to think the victims were stupid for playing with a weird glowing material but these are likely uneducated people who're just trying to get by. That they were able to run into such a dangerous substance is a tragedy.
moffkalast 5y ago
> Devair Ferreira himself survived despite receiving 7 Gy of radiation. He died in 1994 of cirrhosis aggravated by depression and binge drinking. I'd be binge drinking too if some invisible dust killed my entire family.

an1sotropy 5y ago

Kyle Hill on youtube has made a great (and heart-breaking) video about it: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3NJXGSIIA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-k3NJXGSIIA

dredmorbius 5y ago
Excellent and recommended.

rudian 5y ago

The events section reads like a horror story. I can’t imagine what that poor daughter could have gone through.

TheGigaChad 5y ago

Brown people, not very smart.

occz 5y ago

The podcast Well There's Your Problem has an episode covering this incident: https://youtu.be/34rdxDgpaaA https://youtu.be/34rdxDgpaaA As it turns out, when you have highly radioactive stuff in your buildings, you should probably clean that radioactive stuff out when abandoning said building.

RNCTX 5y ago
Love that podcast, surprised it took as long as it did for someone to apply the concept of the Klaus forklift safety video to a podcast, lol.
blankton 5y ago
A german Podcast from Historians regarding this incident: https://www.geschichte.fm/archiv/gag318/ https://www.geschichte.fm/archiv/gag318/

dTal 5y ago

I come back to these sorts of incidents when the topic of warning future generations away from nuclear waste comes up - e.g. "This is not a place of honor" etc. We can't even reliably warn people away now, when we know their language and have internationally recognized symbols for radiation.

kergonath 5y ago
This is far from unique to nuclear materials. In the news today there was an explosion of a tanker truck full of petrol, which killed ~100 people. We cannot reliably warn people away from anything, and yet some industries are safer than others. Applying this standard we’d have run away from petrol a long, long time ago. IOW, the standards you seem to use are unrealistic, and unevenly applied. This really isn’t against you: this exact line of reasoning is quite common and demonstrates that we are terrible at risk management.
- dTal 5y ago
  You seem to be arguing against something I never said, specifically a version of my comment with "and therefore we shouldn't use nuclear power" appended.
jrootabega 5y ago
The sad/inspiring truth about the human condition is that no warnings will be guaranteed to: - convey the danger factually - make people believe or care about it - discourage young/stupid/intoxicated/reckless/nihilistic people - discourage smart people who are intrigued by the danger and will be compelled to explore as much of it as they can - discourage angry people who want to bring the danger to their enemies.
Cthulhu_ 5y ago
It seems curiosity always beats warnings about danger. I mean the curses and the sealing and the like of entering Tutankhamun's tomb were ignored as well. And I'm pretty sure that this container would have the nuclear symbol on it. The best thing to do I think is to make sure nobody can even accidentally find it. Drill a deep hole (miles) where you know it won't end up in the earth's mantle while the material is still dangerous, fill it with nuclear waste, seal it and forget about it. The chances of someone accidentally finding it again thousands of years down the line are minimal. Warnings only make people more curious. I don't remember any warning sign from >1000 years ago that actually keep people away.

sneak 5y ago

This is one of my favorite pages on Wikipedia.

lordnacho 5y ago

I don't quite understand how it's worthwhile to poke a 5cm cylinder to get the scrap metal? Why not just throw it in the pile with everything else? What would a normal hunk of steel be worth?

kragen 5y ago
A normal hunk of steel is worth almost nothing. Most recyclers won't even take it (real recyclers, the kind that pay you for your materials, not fraudulent "recyclers" set up for public relations value). Lead, aluminum, brass, copper, silver, and gold go for much higher prices. Copper is common in heavy steel things.
kergonath 5y ago
You can find all sorts of valuable things in things that look sciency like this. Like platinum bits and pieces. He was probably hoping to find something else than steel. Glowing stuff can also be very expensive, but you need to know people who might be interested, and they usually aren’t the best company. Also, proper equipment to manipulate it.
gallego2007 5y ago
You have to put yourself in the shoes of someone trying to get by… in a developing country no less…
- matheusmoreira 5y ago
  Yeah. My father and grandfather used to work in junkyards like these. If some strange glowing material showed up in a scrapyard, I have no doubt they'd think it was valuable.
deleted 5y ago
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queuebert 5y ago
Cesium is much denser than steel, so it probably felt valuable or rare.

derjames 5y ago

This reminds me about the Juarez incident. https://culturacolectiva.com/history/cobalt-60-ciudad-juarez-mexico-nuclear-accident https://culturacolectiva.com/history/cobalt-60-ciudad-juarez...

queuebert 5y ago
That article talks about an "engine head" of Co-60. That's not a correct translation. The radiotherapy unit has a Co-60 source in it, and it is called a "head", but there is no engine. You just open the doors and shine the source onto a patient for a carefully calculated number of seconds, then shut the doors. It works in an almost identical way to the Cs-137 source from above.

Trufa 5y ago

For those who can speak spanish, there's a song about it from a Uruguayan duo you might enjoy: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YIalaC0M_A https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3YIalaC0M_A

xhrpost 5y ago

What would be the point of incinerating contaminated material? This isn't a biological threat like bacteria or poison in which case the chemical alteration of the substance through fire negates the threat. Wouldn't the radioactivity remain either in ash or fumes?

singlow 5y ago
I assume that the radioactivity is dispersed enough to not be a concern. Leaving the objects whole would have risked them being found and used/recycled.

m0llusk 5y ago

It seems strange that this Wikipedia page keeps getting posted on HN. It is kind of an interesting event, but what exactly is the point of bringing it up over and over? If it is that important then wouldn't it make more sense to write just a little bit about the context and how it relates to modern products and practices which have changed in the following decades?

warent 5y ago
I posted this article. I was reading about Brazil on Wikipedia and the rabbit hole brought me to this article which blew my mind. I was surprised I'd never heard about it before, and wanted to share with the community because it seemed likely others would find it interesting as well. That turned out to be true (plus I think @dang boosted the article to help it get attention) HN isn't just about entrepreneurship. It's really about any kind of cerebral topic. Anyway, it is STEM related which is a significant part of HN.
- m0llusk 5y ago
  That is all valid and good, but I would suggest that in order to make HN as good as it can be it might be worth searching for a link before posting it. Even if posting the link is still the right thing to do this offers the potential of reflecting on the dozens of past threads in order to understand more. I used the HN search feature on this title and found around over a dozen previous threads many of which were small yet interesting.
  - warent 5y ago
    HN has a built-in duplication checker that automatically redirects to the most recent submission of an article within a certain time. If it isn't working properly then Dan would update it, or mark as [Dupe] let the community member know to stop. Having new conversations about old topics is a normal part of communication between humans. Search shows this article is posted on average once per year which is hardly beating a dead horse on old exhausted discussions. I'm sensing there are reasons beneath the surface of why this is affecting you so deeply.

stalfosknight 5y ago

I don't understand why people thought it was a good idea to crack open medical equipment with radiation symbols on it and play with the stuff they found inside.

HeyLaughingBoy 5y ago
Because not everyone has the education to know that it's dangerous. If you left school at age 12 to support your family (assuming you made it that far), it's not likely that you'd know what the symbol even means.

ratww 5y ago

If anyone else is interested in more information about the case, this is the best properly sourced article I could find. It's in portuguese but translation works well. http://mapadeconflitos.ensp.fiocruz.br/conflito/go-vitimas-do-cesio-137-ate-hoje-lutam-pelo-reconhecimento-pleno-de-seus-direitos/ http://mapadeconflitos.ensp.fiocruz.br/conflito/go-vitimas-d...

no1lives4ever 5y ago

In 2010 Delhi University sold a not in use Gammacell 220 research irradiator to a scrap dealer that was in the local news for a few days https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayapuri#2010_Mayapuri_radiological_accident https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mayapuri#2010_Mayapuri_radiolo...

fmakunbound 5y ago

> 50,000 rolls of toilet paper [contaminated] What happened there I wonder.

itronitron 5y ago

More recently (2019) in Seattle... The International Isotopes team sawed into the holder for the source, which otherwise would not have fit into the transport vessel, but then cut into the source itself. That released about 2,900 curies of the material, contaminating 13 people and all seven floors of the facility, according to DOE’s March 30 report on the accident. https://www.exchangemonitor.com/seattle-cesium-spill-clean-year-nnsa-nonproliferation-chief-says/ https://www.exchangemonitor.com/seattle-cesium-spill-clean-y...

lqet 5y ago
One of my favorite nuclear incidents (although uncritical): in 2014, it was discovered that workers in the Swiss nuclear plant Leibstadt drilled several holes [0] into the primary containment to install a fire extinguisher [1]. [0] https://www.saldo.ch/fileadmin/content/files/artikel/2016/woWAQz.png https://www.saldo.ch/fileadmin/content/files/artikel/2016/wo... [1] https://www.ensi.ch/de/2014/11/05/kkl-beschaedigungen-am-primaercontainment-vom-24-juni-2014/ https://www.ensi.ch/de/2014/11/05/kkl-beschaedigungen-am-pri...
- connordoner 5y ago
  Talk about a bad day at work, huh?!
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- iSnow 5y ago
  It went unnoticed for 6y too. I can only imagine the ruckus it caused in 2014 during the inspection.
  - ethbr0 5y ago
    It's things like that, and the watch standers and damage control officers of the Bonhomme Richard, that make you blink about rarely-used safety organizations. If you're not auditing your rare-action groups adherence to standards via indepdent, out-of-chain assessment, assume they're hopelessly broken.