List of civilian radiation accidents

This article lists notable civilian accidents involving

1. There must be well-attested and substantial health damage, property damage or contamination.
2. The damage must be related directly to radioactive materials or ionizing radiation from a man-made source, not merely taking place at a facility where such are being used.
3. To qualify as "civilian", the operation/material must be principally for non-military purposes.
4. The event is not an event involving
   nuclear reactor
   .

Before 1950s

• Clarence Madison Dally (1865–1904) – No INES level – New Jersey – overexposure of laboratory worker
• Various dates – No INES level – France – overexposure of scientists
  • Marie Curie (1867–1934) was a Polish-French physicist and chemist. She was a pioneer in the early field of radioactivity, later becoming the first two-time Nobel laureate and the only person with Nobel Prizes in physics and chemistry. Her death, at age 67, in 1934 was from aplastic anemia due to massive exposure to radiation in her work,^[2] much of which was carried out in a shed with no proper safety measures being taken, as the damaging effects of hard radiation were not generally understood at that time. She was known to carry test tubes full of radioactive isotopes in her pocket, and to store them in her desk drawer, resulting in massive exposure to radiation. She was known to remark on the pretty blue-green light the metals gave off in the dark. Although her papers are likely to present little risk today, they are nonetheless contaminated with Radium. They are kept in lead-lined boxes, and those who wish to consult them must wear gloves and sign a waiver out of caution.^[3][4]
• Various dates – No INES level – various locations – overexposure of workers
  • Luminescent radium was used to paint watches and other items that glowed. The most notable incident is the "Radium Girls" of Orange, New Jersey where many workers suffered from radiation poisoning. Other towns including Ottawa, Illinois experienced contamination of homes and other structures, and became Superfund cleanup sites.
• Various dates – No INES level – Colorado, USA – contamination
  • Radium mining and manufacturing left a number of streets in the state's capital and largest city of Denver contaminated.^[5]
• 1927–1930 – No INES level – USA – radium poisoning
  • Eben Byers ingested almost 1400 bottles of Radithor, a radioactive patent medicine, leading to his death in 1932. He is buried in Allegheny Cemetery in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a lead-lined coffin.^[6]

1950s

• March, 1957 – No INES level – Houston, Texas, USA – exposure of workers
  • Two employees of a company licensed by the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission to encapsulate sources for radiographic cameras received radiation burns after being exposed to ¹⁹²Ir powder. The incident was reported in Look Magazine in 1961, but investigations published by the Mayo Clinic that same year found few of the radiological injuries claimed in widespread press reports.^{[citation needed]}
• 10 October 1957 – Windscale fire at the facility in Cumberland, Northern England (now Sellafield, Cumbria), UK. It is amongst the world's worst incidents, rated 5 on the International Nuclear Event Scale, lasted for 3 days, spreading significant quantities of radioactive isotopes across UK and Europe.
• 2 July 1956 - Sylvania Electric Products explosion in Queens, New York City. Explosions of thorium slugs resulted in the death by toxic heavy metal poisoning of one plant employee.^[7]
• June, 1958 – Y-12 National Security Complex criticality incident – Eight workers injured in the incident.

1960s

• In the
  Co-60
  lost source in Mexico City and brought it home. Prolonged exposure to the source caused the death of the boy and three other members of the family.

• In 1964, Robert Peabody died after an accident at the United Nuclear Corporation Fuels Recovery Plant in Wood River Junction Rhode Island.

1970s

• 1975 –
  TBq source remained unknown to the physicians. He died 13 days after exposure; his whole body dose was evaluated at 12 Gy, non-uniform.^[8]
• 1977 –
  United Kingdom
  – release of nuclear material

• An explosion at the
  Dounreay Nuclear Power Development Establishment caused a mixture of unrecorded waste to be leaked from a waste disposal shaft.^[9]

• July 13, 1978 – Institute for High Energy Physics in Protvino, Russia – Anatoli Bugorski survives high-energy proton beam from a particle accelerator passing through his brain.^[10]
• July 16, 1979 – Church Rock uranium mill spill – release of radioactive mine tailings

• An earth/clay
  km) down the Puerco River^[11] and also near a Navajo farming community that uses surface waters. As a result, the Navajo community suffered serious health implications.^[12]
  The pond was past its planned and licensed life and had been filled two feet (60 cm) deeper than design, despite evident cracking.

• September 29, 1979 –
  L (2,100 Bq/L) of tritium.^{[13][14][15][16]}

• Early 1981 -
  radiation burns from which he would ultimately die. Although the source of radiation was never conclusively determined, the US Nuclear Regulatory Commission strongly suspected that the source was an ¹⁹²Ir industrial radiographic source which had temporarily gone missing and had been in the care of a fellow industrial radiographer living near Crofut. At the time of his injury and death, Crofut was reported to have been the first such death in the US since the Manhattan Project. Crofut's death is notable for being the only US death attributable to an unknown source of radiation, along with being the only known case in the US of a suspected suicide undertaken via radiation exposure.^[17]
• July 1981 – Lycoming,
  Nine Mile Point, New York. An overloaded wastewater tank was deliberately flushed into a building subbasement, resulting in a pool four feet deep. This caused a number of the approximately 150 55-gallon drums stored there to overturn and spill their contents. Fifty thousand U.S. gallons (190 m³) of contaminated water was discharged into Lake Ontario.^[18]
• 1982 –
  whistleblower.^{[citation needed}
  ]
• 1982 – Cobalt-60 (possibly from a radiotherapy source) became recycled into steel rebar and used in the construction of buildings in northern
  Taipower brought a Geiger counter to his apartment to learn more about the device, and discovered that his apartment was contaminated.^[20] Despite awareness of the problem, owners of some of the buildings suspected to be contaminated have continued to rent apartments out to tenants (in part because selling the units is illegal). Some research has found that the radiation has had an apparent "beneficial" effect upon the health of the tenants based on the death rate from cancers.^[21] Another study looking at the incidence of cancer found that although the overall risk of cancer was sharply reduced (SIR = 0.6, 95% CI 0.5 – 0.7), the incidence of certain leukemias in men (n = 6, SIR = 3.4, 95% CI 1.2 – 7.4) and thyroid cancer in women (n = 6, SIR = 2.6, 95% CI 1.0 – 5.7) was greater.^[22][23]
• December 6, 1983 – Ciudad Juárez, Mexico.^[24] In the Ciudad Juárez cobalt-60 contamination incident, a local resident salvaged materials from a discarded radiation therapy machine containing 6,010 pellets of ⁶⁰Co. The transport of the material led to severe contamination of his truck. When the truck was scrapped, it in turn contaminated another five tonnes of steel to an estimated 300 Ci (11 TBq) of activity. This steel was used to manufacture kitchen and restaurant table legs and rebar, some of which was shipped to the U.S. and Canada. 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. In the state of Sinaloa, 109 houses were condemned due to use of contaminated building material. This incident prompted the Nuclear Regulatory Commission and Customs Service to install radiation detection equipment at all major border crossings.^[25]
• 1984 Lost source accident in
  Ir-192 source was taken home by a laborer resulting in eight deaths in the 1984 Moroccan radiation accident. Either a drive cable detached from a pigtail or the connection between the pigtail and the source failed. As a result, the source was lost within an industrial site, the source was taken home by a non-radiographic worker who along with seven members of his family died.^[26]
• 1985 to 1987 – The
  safety-critical
  systems.
• September 13, 1987 – In the Goiânia accident, scavengers broke open a radiation-therapy machine in an abandoned clinic in Goiânia, Brazil. They sold the kilocurie (40 TBq) caesium-137 source as a glowing curiosity. Two hundred and fifty people were contaminated; four died.^[27]
• June 6, 1988 – Radiation Sterilizers, Inc. (now Sterigenics) in Decatur, Georgia reported a leak of ¹³⁷Cs at their facility. Seventy thousand medical supply containers and milk cartons were recalled.^[28]
• 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; another lost two limbs. A number of safety systems at the plant had been disabled, and workers were unaware of the danger posed by the radioactive source.^[29]
• 1989 – In the Kramatorsk radiological accident, a small capsule containing highly radioactive ¹³⁷Cs was found inside the concrete wall in an apartment building in Kramatorsk, Ukrainian SSR. It is believed that the capsule, originally contained in a measurement device, was lost sometime during the late 1970s and ended up mixed in with gravel used to construct that building in 1980. By the time the capsule was discovered, four residents of the building had died from leukemia and 17 more received varying doses of radiation.^[30]

1990s

• June 24, 1990 –
  Soreq, Israel – An operator at a commercial irradiation facility bypassed safety systems to clear a jam in the product conveyor area. The one- to two-minute exposure resulted in a whole body dose estimated at 10 Gy (1,000 rad) or more. He died 36 days later despite extensive medical care.^[31][32]
• December 10–20, 1990 – a
  radiotherapy.^[33]
• October 26, 1991 –
  Nesvizh, Belarus – An operator at an atomic sterilization facility bypassed the safety systems to clear a jammed conveyor. Upon entering the irradiation chamber he was exposed to an estimated whole body dose of 11 Gy, with some portions of the body receiving upwards of 20 Gy. Despite prompt intensive medical care, he died 113 days after the accident.^[34]
• June, 1992 - A
  Institute for Animal Health in the UK, now the Pirbright Institute, received an approximately 2.5 Gy dose from ³²P labelled organo-phosphate as part of an experiment to label virus infected cells. The company shipping the material had supplied over 1000 times the amount and the receiving site did not have adequate monitoring facilities for source material.^{[clarification needed][citation needed}
  ]
• November 16, 1992 – Indiana Regional Cancer Center – After treating a patient with HDR brachytherapy, personnel ignored alarms indicating high radiation levels and an available radiation survey meter was not used to confirm or rule out the area alarm's signal. A radioactive pellet of ¹⁹²Ir had broken off inside the patient during treatment. The patient was transported back to a nursing home where the catheter containing the radioactive pellet fell out four days later. The patient received a thousand times the intended dose and died several days later.^[35]
• November 17, 1992 -
  amputated. Thiệp lost the fourth and fifth fingers on his left hand, which subsequently suffered chronic stiffness and radiation-induced fibrosis. He returned to work at the facility in Hanoi in 1994, after more than 600 days of treatment for acute radiation injuries.^[36]
• November 19, 1992 – A 10 Ci (370 GBq)
  IQ of 46.^{[37][38][39][40][41]}
• August 31, 1994 – Commerce Township, Michigan – A home-made neutron source built by 17-year-old David Hahn was discovered in his mother's back yard. The unshielded neutron source exposed his neighborhood to 1,000 times the normal levels of background radiation.^[42]
• October 21, 1994 – Theft of radioactive material in Tammiku: a strong caesium-137 source was stolen by scrap metal scavengers in Tammiku, Männiku, Saku Parish, Estonia. The man who carried the source home received a 4,000 rad whole-body dose and died 12 days after first taking it. In addition, the man's stepson sustained radiation burn injuries to his hands after he found and touched the source after the man had placed it inside a kitchen drawer.^[43]
• September, 1996 – San José, Costa Rica: A cobalt radiation therapy device was not properly tuned and 116 patients that were undergoing treatment were irradiated with a very high dose.^[44][45]
• May 1998 –
  scrap metal containing radioactive sources; the radioactive cloud drifted to Switzerland before being detected.^[27][46]
• December 1998 – Istanbul, Turkey – two sealed transport packages for spent ⁶⁰Co teletherapy sources from a shipment of three planned for export in 1993 were instead stored in a warehouse in Ankara, then moved to Istanbul, where a new owner sold them off as scrap metal. The buyers dismantled the containers, exposing themselves and others to ionizing radiation. Eighteen people, including seven children, were admitted to hospital. Ten of the adults developed acute radiation syndrome. One exposed ⁶⁰Co source was retrieved, but the source from the other package was still unaccounted for one year later. It is believed that the second container was empty all along, but this could not be conclusively proven from company records.^[47]
• 1999 – A road near Mrima Hill, Kenya was rebuilt using local materials later found to be radioactive. Some workers were exposed to excessive radiation, and many residents of the area were tested for exposure. 2,975 t of roadway material were to be dug up to eliminate the hazard.^[48]
• 1999 - Yanango, Peru: A construction worker and his family were exposed to an Ir-192 industrial radiography source after the worker picked-up the source and carried it in his back pocket for several hours.^[49] The exposure received to his whole body was estimated to be approximately 150 Rem, and exposure to his right buttocks was 10,000 Rad.

2000s

• February 1, 2000 –
  Samut Prakan, Thailand without warning signs.^[50] It was then stolen from the car park and dismantled in a junkyard for scrap metal. Workers completely removed the ⁶⁰Co source from the lead shielding, and became ill shortly thereafter. The radioactive nature of the metal and the resulting contamination was not discovered until 18 days later. Seven injuries and three deaths resulted from this incident.^[51]
• August 2000 – March 2001; at the
  Instituto Oncologico Nacional of Panama, 28 patients receiving treatment for prostate cancer and cancer of the cervix received lethal doses of radiation due to a modification in the protocol for measuring radiation used without a verification test. The negligence, unique in its scope, was investigated by the IAT from May 26 – June 1, 2001.^[52]
• February 2001 – A medical accelerator at the Bialystok Oncology Center in Poland malfunctioned, resulting in five female patients receiving excessive doses of radiation while undergoing breast cancer treatment.^[53] The incident was discovered when one of the patients complained of a painful radiation burn. In response, a local technician was called in to repair the device, but was unable to do so, and in fact caused further damage. Subsequently, competent authorities were notified, but as the apparatus had been tampered with, they were unable to ascertain the exact doses of radiation received by the patients (localized doses might have been in excess of 60 Gy). No deaths were reported as a result of this incident, although all affected patients required skin grafts. The attending doctor was charged with criminal negligence, but in 2003 a district court ruled that she was not responsible for the incident. The hospital technician was fined.^[54]
• December 2, 2001 –
  lead-lined drums.^[56]
• March 11, 2002 – INES Level 2 – A 2.5
  court.^[58][59]
• 2003 – Cape of Navarin,
  R/h; in July 2004 a second inspection of the same RTG showed that gamma radiation emission had risen to 87 R/h and that ⁹⁰Sr had begun to leak into the environment.^[60] In November 2003, a completely dismantled RTG located on the island of Yuzhny Goryachinsky in the Kola Bay was found. The generator's radioactive heat source was found on the ground near the shoreline in the northern part of the island.^[60]
• September 10, 2004 –
  mSv/h.^[60]
• 2005 – Dounreay, U.K. In September, the site's cementation plant was closed when 266 liters of radioactive reprocessing residues were spilled inside containment.^[61][62] In October, another of the site's reprocessing laboratories was closed down after nose-blow tests of eight workers tested positive for trace radioactivity.^[63]
• 2005-2006 – Epinal radiotherapy accident [fr]: a problem in dosimetry software caused an overdosage during radiotherapy. During this period 7500 patients were treated for prostate cancer at the Jean Monnet Hospital in Epinal, France. An investigation showed that 5 people died from radiation, 24 were severely injured, 700 were significantly overexposed, and 4500 were mildly exposed.^[64]
• March 11, 2006 – at Fleurus, Belgium, an operator working for Sterigenics, at a medical equipment sterilization site, entered the irradiation room and remained there for 20 seconds. The room contained a source of ⁶⁰Co which was not immersed in the pool of water.^[65] Three weeks later, the worker suffered symptoms typical of acute radiation syndrome (vomiting, loss of hair, fatigue). One estimate that he was exposed to a dose of between 4.4 and 4.8 Gy due to a malfunction of the control-command hydraulic system maintaining the radioactive source in the pool. The operator spent over one month in a specialized hospital before going back home. To protect workers, the federal nuclear control agency AFCN and private auditors from AVN recommended Sterigenics to install a redundant system of security. It is an accident of level 4 on the INES scale.^[66][67][68]
• Teenager Lisa Norris died in 2006 after she was given an overdose of radiation as a result of
  linac
  machine to the whole of the central nervous system to be delivered in twenty equal fractions of 1.75 Gy, which was to be followed by 19.8 Gy to be delivered to the tumor only (in eleven fractions of 1.8 Gy). In the first phase of the treatment a 58% overdose occurred, and Norris's CNS suffered a dose of 55.5 Gy. The second phase of the treatment was abandoned on medical advice, and Norris survived for some time after the overdose.
• January 23, 2008 – A licensed radiology technologist,
  Arcata, California performed 151 CT scan slices on a single 3 mm level on the head of a 23-month-old child over a 65-minute period. The child suffered radiation burns (skin erythema) to a small strip of his face and head. In one report, an independent investigation of the child's blood was said to have found "substantial chromosomal damage"^[73] but subsequent reports reported no lasting harm.^[74] The technologist was fired, and her license was permanently revoked on March 16, 2011, by the state of California, citing "gross negligence".^[73] The hospital's radiology manager, Bruce Fleck
  , testified that Knickerbocker's conduct was "a rogue act of insanity".
• August 23–24, 2008 – INES Level 3 – Fleurus, Belgium – Nuclear material leak. A gaseous leak of a radioisotope of iodine, ¹³¹I, was detected at a large medical radioisotope laboratory, Institut national des Radio-Eléments. Belgian authorities implemented restrictions on use of local farming produce within 5 km of the leak, when higher-than-expected levels of contamination was detected in local grass. The particular isotope of iodine has a half-life of 8 days.^[75][76] The European Commission sent out a warning over their ECURIE-alert system on the 29th of August.^[77] The quantity of radioactivity released into the environment was estimated at 45 GBq ¹³¹I, which corresponds to a dose of 160 μSv (effective dose) for a hypothetical person remaining permanently at the site's enclosure.^[78]
• February 2008-August 2009 – A software misconfiguration in a
  U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) has estimated that patients received doses between 3 Gy and 4 Gy.^[79]

• April 2010 – INES level 4 – A 35-year-old man was hospitalized in New Delhi after handling radioactive scrap metal. Investigation led to the discovery of an amount of scrap metal containing ⁶⁰Co in the Delhi's industrial district of Mayapuri. The 35-year-old man later died from his injuries, while six others remained hospitalized.^[80][81] The radioactivity was from a gammacell 220 research source which was incorrectly disposed of by sale as scrap metal.^[82] The gammacell 220 was originally made by Atomic Energy of Canada Limited whose gamma irradiation work is now under the name of Nordion. Nordion does not offer servicing for gammacell 220 machines but can arrange for, in theory, safe disposal of unwanted units.^[83] A year later, Delhi Police charged six DU professors from the Chemistry Department for negligent disposal of the radioactive device.^[84]
• July 2010 – During a routine inspection at the
  Germany for further analysis, after which it was likely to be recycled.^[85]
• August 2010 - A Cesium-137 radioactive source was fortuitously discovered beneath the asphalt of Stargarder Straße in Prenzlauer Berg, Germany, where it had probably been for the past 20 years. The site was dug up, and the source transferred to the Helmholtz-Zentrum Berlin.^[86]
• October 2011 – At a hospital in Rio de Janeiro, a 7-year-old girl was treated for acute lymphoblastic leukemia with whole brain radiation. The prescriptions were done manually in a form with no formal peer review process. Because of an error in the registration of the number of sessions, she received the full dose in each session of radiotherapy. Even with early toxicity, the doctor refused to assess the patient, because some of the complaints were usual. The full treatment was finished in about 8 sessions and the girl was admitted with radiation burns. She developed frontal lobe necrosis and died in June 2012. After an investigation, the physicist, technician, and physician were charged with manslaughter.^[87]
• May 2013 – J-PARC radioactive isotope leakage accident. On 23 May 2013, accidental leakage of radioactive isotopes occurred in the high-intensity proton accelerator facility, one of the nuclear research facilities in
  Tokai-mura, Ibaraki Prefecture. In addition to the diffusion of radioactive isotopes due to the malfunction of equipment, the response to the accident was mishandled, with 33 out of 55 personnel who were on site at the time exposed. A small amount of radioactive isotope leaked outside the controlled area as well. This incident was tentatively evaluated as an International Nuclear Event Scale Level 1 event by the Japanese Nuclear Regulatory Commission.^{[citation needed}
  ]
• May 2013 – A batch of metal-studded belts sold by online retailer
  ASOS.com were confiscated and held in a U.S. radioactive storage facility after testing positive for ⁶⁰Co.^[88]
• December 2013 – A truck transporting a 111 TBq
  teletherapy source from a Tijuana hospital to a waste storage facility was hijacked near Mexico City.^[89] This triggered a nationwide search by Mexican authorities. The truck was found a day later near Hueypoxtla, where it was discovered that the source had been removed from its shielding. The source was found shortly after in a nearby field, where it was safely recovered.^[90] The thieves could have received a fatal dose of radiation.^[90][91]
• August 2018 – A 23 kg radioactive source used for industrial radiography (detecting defects in metal weldments) went missing from the back of a pickup truck during transportation in Malaysia. It contains ¹⁹²Ir and was reported missing on August 10. This is not the first time such an incident happened.^[92]

2020s

• February 2020 - Caesium-137 contamination in Serpong, Indonesia. Radioactive contamination was found on empty land close to a residential building, with estimated dose exposure about 148 mSv/h.^[93] Depleted uranium and an empty cylinder was also found in two houses in the same neighborhood. The owner was known to be a retired BATAN (National Nuclear Energy Agency of Indonesia) employee.^[94] Decontamination procedure was done by removing 87 drums of radioactive soil, and cutting trees and grass.^[95] A measurable Caesium-137 trace was detected on two residents, at 0,12 mSv and 0,5 mSv each.^[96]
• May 2021 - In Mumbai, Maharashtra Anti Terrorism Squad arrested two people on 5 May with 7.1 kg of natural uranium estimated worth ₹21.3 crore (US$2.7 million). It was unclear how they acquired the material. The National Investigation Agency later took over the case.^[97]
• January 2023 -
  radioactive capsule containing a 19 giga becquerel caesium-137^[98] ceramic source^[99] went missing from a truck on which it was being transported across Western Australia. On 27 January 2023, members of the public were warned to observe a safe distance of five metres if they found the capsule, and drivers who had recently used the Great Northern Highway were asked to check their vehicle tyres in case it was lodged in the tread.^[100] It was located on 1 February 2023.^[101]

• Background radiation
• International Nuclear Event Scale
• List of civilian nuclear accidents
• List of military nuclear accidents
• List of nuclear reactors
• List of nuclear whistleblowers
• Lists of disasters
• Lists of nuclear disasters and radioactive incidents
• Nuclear power debate
• Nuclear power
• Nuclear reactor
• Radiation
• X-ray

References