Word: cesium
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Indeed, Brazilian authorities were dealing with the worst known episode of radioactive contamination in the West. In mid-September, a hapless junkyard dealer in Goiania (pop. 1.2 million), a city about 120 miles southwest of Brasilia, had pried open a lead cylinder containing a capsule of radioactive cesium 137, an isotope used for treating cancer. The canister had been sold to him as scrap from an abandoned local medical clinic. During the next six days, more than 200 townspeople were exposed to and at least one even ate the deadly bluish powder before Brazilian officials could contain the contamination...
...glittery stuff proved to be cesium-137, a radioactive isotope used in cancer-therapy equipment. The scrap collector found the casing a month ago in a spot where a radiotherapy clinic had once stood. Though months may pass before the final toll is known, the Goiania episode promises to be that rare nightmare, a radiation mishap that kills several people. The worst of these was last year's explosion at the Chernobyl nuclear reactor, which Soviet authorities acknowledge has claimed 31 lives...
...police inquiry is under way to determine why the casing remained at the clinic site. Workers from the National Atomic Energy Commission are preparing to entomb the lead container, the cesium and other contaminated material in concrete. The commission has decided that the material should be airlifted to a remote mountain range in the Amazon jungle...
...method, which like radiology was developed around the turn of the century, is simple: food passes through a lead-shielded concrete chamber where radioactive cobalt 60 or cesium 137 bombards it with gamma rays, killing insects and bacteria and sometimes slowing ripening. The food does not become radioactive. "There's nothing in common at all between a nuclear reactor like Chernobyl and an irradiator," says Karl Abraham, a spokesman for the Nuclear Regulatory Commission (NRC). "It's like comparing bananas to tigers." Treated food "can be immediately eaten," says George Giddings, director of food irradiation at Isomedix...
Concern in other European countries remains high. In France, which has 44 nuclear-power plants, an independent group of scientists, farmers and doctors claim they have found significant levels of radioactive cesium in goat cheese, leeks and other foods. In Britain the Foreign Office is investigating the possibility of bringing international legal action against the Soviets in an effort to recover losses incurred by sheep farmers who were prevented from bringing their animals to slaughter because the sheep had eaten contaminated grass...