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Comment by olliej | Hacker News Reader

This is the stolen/abandoned medical radiotherapy machine.

The TLDR is a hospital shutdown but a lawsuit meant that they could empty it. This left equipment inside, including a radiotherapy machine.

People broke in to steal stuff that look expensive, and decided the radiation source (they didn't know what it was or contained) looked like it would be a worth a lot, and was portable enough to be stolen. So they did.

They tried to disassemble it, in doing so managed to get to the raw radioactive pellets. From there people played with it, and it spread around, before they eventually took it to a junk yard.

A number of people got sick, at least one died (OTOH).

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I think you are thinking of the accident in Goiânia (Brazil) in 1987, but this article is actually about the accident in Ciudad Juárez (Mexico) in 1983.

There have been quite a few accidents involving radiation sources from disused radiotherapy machines, see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_acc... . In particular, there was an incident in Taiwan in 1982 which seems extremely similar to the one described in this article, it also involved a Cobolt-60 source contaminating recycled steel.

oh nuts, you are correct.

How many times has this happened???

O_o

Wikipedia has a list of 'Civilian radiation accidents' [1] which is worryingly long.

Johnstonarchive has an interesting list of 'radialogical events' [2] which is easy to search through for 'theft' and 'lost source'.

Wikipedia also has a more specific list of orphaned source events [3]

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_civilian_radiation_acc...

[2] http://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radevents/index.html

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Orphan_source

It's happened more than once. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goi%C3%A2nia_accident is one famous case

Thanks, that was the one I was familiar with soI was surprised by the reference to Mexico here.

This is the one I was looking for. For anyone not familiar, read the Events section. It’s crazy.

I've read this article previously, and to me, this is the most horrifying paragraph...

> 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. [...] There he spread some of it on the concrete floor. His six-year-old daughter, Leide das Neves Ferreira, later ate a sandwich 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 sandwich she was consuming.

in fairness to him a lot of people in the first half of the 1900s did this kind of thing, so in the absence of knowledge of radiation and the harm it causes this is clearly a "reasonable" belief (to humans at least)

The horrifying part I was referring to was not the fact that he dismantled the radiation source, but that his daughter ate a radioactive sandwich... It's surreal horror from a Hollywood thriller.

Also this:

> Devair Ferreira himself survived despite receiving 7 Gy of radiation. He died in 1994 of cirrhosis aggravated by depression and binge drinking.

A ‘Gy’ is a ‘Gray’, and is a measure of absorbed radiation (almost always estimated obviously). Deviar absorbed more than anyone yet survived the incident that ultimately took the lives of his wife and daughter and two of his employees.

For reference a Gray is ‘defined as the absorption of one joule of radiation energy per kilogram of matter.[1]’. The fact that he survived this blows me away.

[1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gray_(unit)

I remember reading that his family was under constant exposure to radiation, but himself was moving around, so he was under intermittent exposure to radiation across multiple occasions, and it was a likely explanation of his survival despite having received the greatest total dose.

I remember hearing about this before...that poor kid.

>When an international team arrived to treat her, she was discovered confined to an isolated room in the hospital because the staff were afraid to go near her.

The real WTF is how preventable it all was and then who got the blame.

>The Instituto Goiano de Radioterapia (IGR), a private radiotherapy institute in Goiânia,[1] was just 1 km (0.6 mi) northwest of Praça Cívica, the administrative center of the city. It moved to its new premises in 1985, leaving behind a caesium-137-based teletherapy unit that had been purchased in 1977.[5] The fate of the abandoned site was disputed in court between IGR and the Society of Saint Vincent de Paul, then owner of the premises.[6] On September 11, 1986, the Court of Goiás stated it had knowledge of the abandoned radioactive material in the building.[6] Four months before the theft, on May 4, 1987, Saura Taniguti, then director of Ipasgo, the institute of insurance for civil servants, used police force to prevent one of the owners of IGR, Carlos Figueiredo Bezerril, from removing the objects that were left behind.[6] Figueiredo then warned the president of Ipasgo, Lício Teixeira Borges, that he should take responsibility "for what would happen with the caesium bomb".[6] The court posted a security guard to protect the hazardous abandoned equipment.[7] Meanwhile, the owners of IGR wrote several letters to the National Nuclear Energy Commission (CNEN), warning them about the danger of keeping a teletherapy unit at an abandoned site, but they could not remove the equipment by themselves once a court order prevented them from doing so.[6][7]

So the doctor group know that the radioactive source is dangerous and tries to do something about it but a court orders them not to remove it.

>In light of the deaths caused, the three doctors who had owned and operated IGR were charged with criminal negligence. Because the accidents occurred before the promulgation of the Federal Constitution of 1988 and because the substance was acquired by the clinic and not by the individual owners, the court could not declare the owners of IGR liable. One of the medical doctors owning IGR and the clinic's physicist were ordered to pay R$100,000 for the derelict condition of the building.

Then the doctors are sued because they didn't do enough to prevent theft?

That was the one I was confusing this with -- @vilhelm_s also pointed my mistake out -- whoops

Heads up, as others have this is actually a different yet similar event. I'd edit to say such but apparently there's a time limit on editing comments :D

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