Blessed by the Potato

There’s Chernobyl, everyone knows that one. Then a handful of other accidents involving nuclear power generation, with the most famous perhaps being Three Mile Island, though the impact of the non-Chernobyl accidents have been pretty minor.

In the early days of research, there were a fair number of accidents, especially with enriched fuel, and a bunch of military accidents.

But after Chernobyl, most of the worst civilian radiological accidents come from the medical side. As much as people rail against nuclear energy, I don’t hear a lot of people trying to ban nuclear medicine.

The biggest cause of accidents seems to be the escape of radiation sources, with the Goiania, Brazil accident being perhaps the best example. There, a medical clinic moved, and left behind a radiotherapy device. These guys came in to the abandoned, half-demolished structure, and stole the Cesium-137 source at the heart of the machine, to sell for scrap. In dismantling the source, they got a large dose of radiation, and then later did sell the core for scrap. The scrap dealer noticed this blue glow in the material, and — I kid you not — decided it was magic.

He invited his friends and family over to check it out, made jewellery and body paint out of it, and spread this stuff all over. People were putting it on their bodies to increase sexual potency, ingesting it, and selling it. It took over two weeks before it was realized that a disaster was unfolding. 4 people died, many others got sick, and something like the equivalent of 100 transport truck containers of contaminated waste were produced.

There are also a number of cases of accidental over-exposure from radiotherapy or imaging, though those seem to be more accepted as there is always some background medical mistake risk.