Qualla: Goiânia accident

Goiânia accident: Introduction

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The glow was beautiful. Deep blue, constant, shining out from the small hole Roberto dos Santos had made with a screwdriver. Neither he nor his companion Wagner Mota Pereira knew what it was. They had found the heavy steel cylinder at an abandoned medical clinic two days before, on September 13, 1987, and had hauled it to Roberto's home in the Aeroporto district of Goiânia hoping to scrap it for metal. Now, on September 16, the cylinder was showing them what was inside. Over the next two weeks, everyone who touched that glowing powder - friends, children, family members, scrapyard workers - would fall ill in ways their doctors could not initially explain. It was the worst radiological accident in the Americas, and it was caused by caesium chloride, 93 grams of a salt roughly 40 times more radioactive than the powder at Chernobyl measured per gram. The people affected were not scientists or soldiers. They were ordinary residents of a city who had encountered something they had no vocabulary to describe.

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Goiânia accident: The Abandoned Clinic

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The Instituto Goiano de Radioterapia had moved to new premises years earlier, leaving behind a teletherapy machine in a building whose ownership was being disputed in court. The clinic's owners had written to the National Nuclear Energy Commission warning that a radioactive sourc...

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Goiânia accident: A Beautiful Blue Light

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Roberto's family, his neighbors, and eventually a neighborhood scrap dealer named Devair Ferreira all saw the glow. It was the Cherenkov-like emission from the caesium-137 salt itself, a feature of high-activity radiation sources exposed to the open air. Devair bought the cylinde...

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Goiânia accident: The Ones Who Died

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Four people died. Leide das Neves Ferreira was six years old. When international medical teams arrived to treat her, they found her alone in an isolation room because the hospital staff were afraid to enter. She lost her hair. Her body swelled. Her kidneys and lungs failed, and s...

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Goiânia accident: A City Scrubbed

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

On the morning of September 29, 1987, a visiting medical physicist used a scintillation counter at the hospital and confirmed what nobody had yet quite believed: there was a radioactive disaster unfolding in Goiania. By the end of that day the city, state, and national government...

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Goiânia accident: What the Accident Left

Thu, 16 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The International Atomic Energy Agency called Goiania "one of the world's worst radiological incidents." On March 17, 2000, a federal court ordered the National Nuclear Energy Commission to pay R$1 million and guarantee medical and psychological treatment for the victims, their d...

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