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The truck, now contaminated by the cobalt-60, subsequently suffered a mechanical failure upon Sotelo's return from the junkyard and remained immobile near his home in Ciudad Juárez for 40 days. [4] Meanwhile, at the junkyard, the use of electromagnets for handling the scrap caused the cobalt-60 granules to spread throughout the yard.
Between March and July 1962, a radiation incident in Mexico City occurred when a ten-year-old boy took home an industrial radiography source that was not contained in its proper shielding. Five individuals received significant doses of radiation from the 200-gigabecquerel cobalt-60 capsule, [1] four of whom died. [2]
A local resident salvaged materials from a discarded radiation therapy machine containing 6,010 pellets of cobalt-60. The transport of the material led to severe contamination of his truck. Remaining pellets in the scrapyard contaminated another 5,000 metric tonnes of steel to an estimated 300 Ci (11 TBq) of activity. This steel was used to ...
The Ciudad Juárez cobalt-60 contamination incident happened after a private medical company that had illegally purchased a radiation therapy unit sold it to a junkyard to be later smelted to produce rebar. These were distributed and used in multiple cities across Mexico and the United States and exposed an estimated four thousand people to ...
The cleanup operation for the Goiânia accident [20] was difficult both because the source containment had been opened, and the radioactive material was water-soluble.. In 1983, a different incident in Mexico wherein cobalt-60 was spilled in an otherwise similar exposure led to a very different pattern of contamination, since the cobalt in such a source is normally in the form of cobalt metal ...
The incident was discovered months later when a truck delivering contaminated building materials to the Los Alamos National Laboratory drove through a radiation monitoring station. Contamination was later measured on roads used to transport the original damaged radiation source. Some pellets were actually found embedded in the roadway.
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Cobalt-60 (60 Co) is a synthetic radioactive isotope of cobalt with a half-life of 5.2714 years. [ 3 ] [ 4 ] : 39 It is produced artificially in nuclear reactors . Deliberate industrial production depends on neutron activation of bulk samples of the monoisotopic and mononuclidic cobalt isotope 59