Qualla: Samut Prakan Radiation Accident

Samut Prakan Radiation Accident: Introduction

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The metal cylinder looked like money. When scrap collectors in Samut Prakan Province found it in an abandoned car park in early February 2000, they did what anyone in their trade would do -- they took it apart. The cylinder was the radioactive core of a Gammatron-3 teletherapy unit, a Siemens-built cancer treatment machine originally imported to Thailand in 1969. It contained cobalt-60, a synthetic isotope that emits highly penetrating gamma rays. By the time doctors realized what had happened, seventeen days after the initial exposure, ten people had been hospitalized with radiation sickness. Three of them would be dead within two months.

Samut Prakan Radiation Accident: A Machine Nobody Wanted

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The cobalt-60 source began its life as a medical instrument at Ramathibodi Hospital in Bangkok, treating cancer patients with precisely directed gamma radiation. The hospital retired the unit in 1994 and sold it to Kamol Sukosol Electric Company, the Thai agent for its Canadian r...

Samut Prakan Radiation Accident: Seventeen Days of Silence

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The four men who pried open the cylinder on that February day immediately began feeling ill -- headaches, nausea, vomiting. They did not connect their symptoms to the metal they had handled. The scrap collectors sold the dismantled pieces at a local scrapyard, where employees con...

Samut Prakan Radiation Accident: Midnight Recovery by Moonlight

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The OAEP's emergency response team arrived at the scrapyard on the evening of February 18 and found radiation levels at the entrance measuring one millisievert per hour -- far above normal background levels. The recovery operation that followed was improvised and urgent. An excav...

Samut Prakan Radiation Accident: The Human Cost

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ten people were ultimately hospitalized with radiation sickness: the four scrap collectors, the two scrapyard employees, the scrapyard owner, her husband, her mother, and her maid. Four of them had received doses exceeding six gray -- a level that causes severe, often fatal damag...

Samut Prakan Radiation Accident: A Symbol Redesigned

Fri, 06 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The international radiation trefoil -- that familiar three-bladed symbol in black and yellow -- had been printed on the teletherapy head. None of the scrap collectors knew what it meant. There were no written warnings in Thai. The Samut Prakan disaster, along with similar orphan-...