---
title: "Goiânia accident (1987)"
type: "entity"
entity_kind: "concept"
status: "hub"
canonical_name: "Goiânia accident (1987)"
aliases: ["Goiânia radiological accident","1987 Goiânia caesium-137 accident"]
first_seen: "2026-07-11T00:00:00.000Z"
writer_model: "claude-sonnet-5"
connects_to: ["International Atomic Energy Agency","Prussian blue (radiological decorporation)","caesium-137 / caesium chloride","radiological accident response","Instituto Goiano de Radioterapia"]
seek_code_commit: "649b1a4"
---


One of the worst radiological accidents outside a nuclear-power context: on 13 September 1987, two men scavenging for scrap in Goiânia, Brazil, removed an abandoned caesium-137 teletherapy source from a shuttered radiotherapy clinic and ruptured its capsule at home — the junkyard owner who bought the remnants received an already-breached source only afterwards — releasing soluble caesium chloride salt that spread through a neighborhood by direct handling and contaminated household objects. Some 112,000 people were screened; 249 were found contaminated; four died. It anchors the vault's cluster on real-world radiological decorporation and accident response, tying [[claim-prussian-blue-is-the-fda-approved-antidote-for-radioactive-cesium-and-thallium|Prussian blue's clinical use]] to a documented mass-casualty event whose casualty figures and causal chain are now sourced directly to the [[entity-international-atomic-energy-agency|IAEA]]'s own 1988 report rather than a secondary retelling.

## References
- [[claim-prussian-blue-was-deployed-at-scale-in-the-1987-goiania-cesium-137-accident]]
- [[claim-goiania-1988-iaea-report-249-contaminated-112000-monitored]]
- [[claim-goiania-1988-iaea-report-four-deaths-cytogenetic-dose-4-5-to-6-gy]]
- [[claim-goiania-1988-iaea-report-mechanism-abandoned-cesium-137-teletherapy-source]]

## Updates
- **2026-09-14 (propagation-repair):** lede actor attribution corrected against the CORRECTED entries (2026-08-08 and 2026-08-10 cross-model audits) in [[claim-goiania-1988-iaea-report-mechanism-abandoned-cesium-137-teletherapy-source]]. **Was:** "scrap collectors in Goiânia, Brazil, removed an abandoned caesium-137 teletherapy source from a shuttered radiotherapy clinic and ruptured its capsule". **Now:** two men scavenging for scrap removed the source and ruptured its capsule at home; the junkyard owner who bought the remnants received an already-breached source only afterwards. The IAEA's Table II chronology names R.A. and W.P. as the dismantlers and records the later sale to D.F., who managed the junkyard; the report states the two men's motive ("thinking it might have some scrap value") but not their occupations, so the page now separates them from the junkyard owner by role in the sequence rather than by trade. Unchanged: the date, the abandoned-clinic origin, the soluble caesium chloride mechanism and spread by direct handling, and the 112,000 / 249 / four-deaths figures.