List of Civilian Radiation Accidents - 1980s

1980s

• July 1981 – Lycoming, Nine Mile Point, New York. An overloaded wastewater tank was deliberately flushed into the waste building sub-basement, filling it to a depth of four feet. This caused some of the approximately 150 55-gallon drums that were stored there to overturn and spill their contents. Fifty thousand U.S. gallons (190 m³) of lesser-contaminated water was discharged into Lake Ontario.
• 1982 – "International Nutronics" of Dover, New Jersey spilled an unknown quantity of radioactive cobalt solution used to treat gems for color, modify chemicals, and sterilize food and medical supplies. The solution spilled into the Dover sewer system and forced the closure of the plant. The Nuclear Regulatory Commission was only informed of the accident ten months later by a whistleblower. In 1986 International Nutronics was fined $35,000 and one of its top executives was sentenced to probation for failure to report the spill.
• 1982 – Radioactive steel scavenged from a nuclear reactor was melted into rebar and used in the construction of apartment buildings in northern Taiwan, mostly in Taipei, from 1982 through 1984. Over 2,000 apartment units and shops were suspected as having been built with the materials. At least 10,000 people are known to have been exposed to long-term low-level irradiation as a result, with at least 40 deaths due to cancer. In 1985, the Taiwanese Atomic Energy Commission covered up the discovery of high levels of radiation in an apartment building by blaming a dentist operating an imaging machine. However, in the summer of 1992, a utility worker for the Taiwanese state-run electric utility Taipower brought a Geiger counter to his apartment to learn more about the device, and discovered that his apartment was contaminated. Despite awareness of the problem, owners of some of the buildings known to be contaminated have continued to rent apartments out to tenants (in part because selling the units is illegal), and as of at least 2003 and likely to the present, no coordinated effort has been made to track down the remaining affected structures. The Taiwan AEC has harassed medical researchers looking into the consequences. Some researchers from Taiwan claimed that the gamma rays from the cobalt-60 had a beneficial effect upon the health of the tenants, but their results proved to be based on methodological errors
• December 6, 1983 – Ciudad Juárez, Mexico, A local resident salvaged materials from a discarded radiation therapy machine carrying 6,000 pellets of 60Co. The dismantling and transport of the material led to severe contamination of his truck; when the truck was scrapped, it in turn contaminated another 5,000 metric tonnes of steel with an estimated 300 Ci (11 TBq) of activity. This material was sold for kitchen or restaurant table legs and building materials, some of which was sent to the U.S. and Canada; the incident was discovered when a truck delivering contaminated building materials months later to the Los Alamos National Laboratory accidentally drove through a radiation monitoring station. Contamination was later measured on the roads that were used to transport the original damaged radiation source. In some cases pellets were actually found embedded in the roadway. In the state of Sinaloa, 109 houses were condemned due to contaminated building material. This incident prompted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Customs Service to install radiation detection equipment at all major border crossings.
• 1985 to 1987, Therac-25 was a radiation therapy machine produced by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited. It was involved with at least six known accidents between 1985 and 1987, in which patients were given massive overdoses of radiation, which were in some cases on the order of hundreds of Grays. At least five patients died of the overdoses. These accidents highlighted the dangers of software control of safety-critical systems.
• September 13, 1987 – In the Goiânia accident, scavengers broke open a radiation-therapy machine in an abandoned clinic of Goiânia, Brazil. They sold the kilocurie (40 TBq) 137Cs source as a glowing curiosity. Two hundred and fifty were contaminated; four died.
• June 6, 1988 – "Radiation Sterilizers" in Decatur, Georgia, reported a leak of 137Cs at their facility. Seventy thousand medical supply containers and milk cartons were recalled. Ten employees were exposed, and three "had enough on them that they contaminated other surfaces," including their homes and cars.
• 5 February 1989 Three workers were exposed to gamma rays from the 60Co source in a medical products irradiation plant in San Salvador, El Salvador. The most exposed person died while another lost a limb. This was a human error accident where a person made the wrong choice to enter the irradiation room.
• In 1989, a small capsule containing highly radioactive caesium-137 was found inside the concrete wall in an apartment building in Kramatorsk, Ukraine. It is believed that the capsule, originally a part of a measurement device, was lost sometime during late 1970s and ended up mixed with gravel used to construct that building in 1980. By the time the capsule was discovered, 6 residents of the building died from leukemia and 17 more received varying doses of radiation. See Kramatorsk nuclear poisoning incident.