RADIOLOGICAL HERITAGE
FATAL ATTRACTIONS
On 13th September 1987, two men entered a partially demolished cancer treatment hospital in the city of Goiânia to search for items with scrap value. After disassembling an abandoned teletherapy unit, they promptly removed some of the assembly components for further dismantling work at home, eventually recovering a strange capsule 'treasure' from inside the equipment's protective rotating head. Fighting back the onset of a sudden illness, one of the men eventually succeeded in puncturing through the capsule cover with a screwdriver, revealing a fascinating deep blue glow emanating from the material within. This was, thereafter, scooped out for further investigation, before several pieces were sold to a local scrapyard. The new owner, perhaps thinking the source to be supernatural or valuable in nature, moved the vessel into his own home and, over the next three days, invited his friends and family to witness the strange glowing substance. Accounts detail that this dust was then distributed to 22 family members; some of whom sprinkled it across local homes and used it to draw sparkling imagery across their skin. The allure, aroused by this miraculously shiny blue substance, would later be described as a maladapted ‘evolutionary trap’ in a report by the International Atomic Energy Agency; a fatal attraction that significantly affected the unfolding crisis.
The tragic events that followed would become infamously known as the Goiânia accident. The ‘orphaned’ radiological source (in this case, 93g of Cesium-137) contaminated a large, uneven swatch of the neighbourhood and residents with an invisible, odourless, and tasteless substance (essentially, undetectable to human senses), eventually causing the deaths of two close family members, and another two scrapyard employees through continuous exposure, in addition to the recurrent exposures of another 249 people in the community to significant doses of radiation that necessitated medical treatments. Moreover, the discovery of this contamination gave rise to a shockwave of fear and anxiety across the local communities, totalling in about 112,000 people requesting medical checks, the demolition of all affected structures, quarantining and disposal of household artefacts, protests against the burial of radioactive remains in the local cemetery (in lead-lined coffins), and the complete removal of topsoil from several sites, in addition to the psychological trauma and economic costs associated with investigating and cleaning up the area. This was only one year after Chronobyl but the panic was caused by less than a handful of crystallised salts, physically spread around houses, neighbourhoods, transport networks, and other medical facilities by the unsuspecting Goiânia residents. Today, six unremarkable mounds containing 3,500 cubic metres of dumped Cs-137 contaminated material in Parque Estadual Telma Ortegal are all that physically remain of the 1987 accident – a 'cesium bomb' as described by the former owners of the teletherapy unit, which city authorities had, in fact, known about 4 months prior to the crisis.
The remarkable story of the Goiânia accident, and several eerily similar incidents varyingly documented by the IAEA in Istanbul (1998), Henan (1999), Samut Prakarn (2000), Liya/ Lia (2002), Kola Harbour (2003), and Mayapuri (2010), draws into sharp relief the obvious dangers associated with inadvertent human intrusions upon radiological waste deposits, and the security and safe management of hazardous substances after they have fulfilled a utilitarian function – in addition to lessons in the worst-case scenarios of ‘radiophobia’ from unfolding events in the absence of any reliable safety standards, risk analysis strategies, proper technical equipment, and knowledge or expert opinion. If anything, these stories simply highlight how history seemingly repeats itself in cases of careless disposal, and unwitting rediscovery, of hazardous orphaned materials, often resulting in radiological injuries or even fatalities. A brief historical overview of other related radiological contamination events, in addition to the unsettling truths of weapons mishaps, reveal that Goiânia was not an isolated instance within our cultural history of interactions with radiological materials. Yet, as with many of these legacies, the events should have been preventable through responsible risk mitigation efforts, and foresight in establishing adequate disposal protocols. Rare mishaps will always occur, but risk is significantly increased in the face of short-term negligence.
MAKING ORPHANS OF THE FUTURE
The material imprints of ‘Tangible’ radiological wastes are, given the wider proliferation of such substances in medical, academic, power-generation and defensive sectors, readily apparent across all facets of our biome – both natural, and built environments. Examples are abound, including the multitudes of isotopes (e.g. Sr-90, Cs-137, Pu-239, Am-241) now embedded within dendrochronology, coral reefs, ocean substrates, coastal sediments and soil strata on every continent, but also in more tangible, conspicuous legacies. We still experience these tangible global legacies in decommissioned reactors buried beneath the parkland we can now walk upon, hazardous equipment abandoned or dismantled and stored in nondescript buildings with trefoil symbols, ageing reactor compartments from fleets of Soviet submarines now isolated in dockland facilities [or scuttled in shallow Arctic waters], expansive exclusion zones turned into branded ‘radioecological reserves’, past colonial landscapes scarred with craters that betray a past life of weapons testing, and surface storage sites charged with monitoring spent nuclear fuel submerged in cooling ponds, or sealed inside concrete-lined containers populating vast warehouses.
'Transcendent’ wastes are also readily apparent, in the broad range of ongoing discussions, plans and theoretical arguments concerning the terminal phase of the nuclear fuel cycle in deep geological deposits pioneered by several nations, in addition to knowledge of nuclear submarine graveyards, and historical dumpsites in the world's oceans that are presently deep beyond the reach of modern cleanup operations. Further to these two ‘T's' in our radiological heritage, the psychological ‘Trauma’ emanating from direct experiences with these radioactive waste legacies, is yet another facet arising from the technical difficulties (but also the routine national secrecy, frequent deceit, and ensuing public distrust) surrounding the operation, clean-up, and decommissioning of nuclear technologies. The International Nuclear and Radiological Event Scale (INES) provides a metric for the physical contamination impacts of nuclear accidents, but by no means does it fairly address the enduring psychological, social, and mental repercussions of radiological landscapes experienced by contemporary populations, much less the advent of distressing behaviour and cultural associations resulting from these events that may be passed down throughout the ages across immediate and successive generations. These psychological landscapes can already be observed today in the Goiânia and Fukushima populations, in addition to the hibakusha and ‘downwinder’ generations; each of whom possess differing cultural and social experiences of the recent Atomic Age across their local environmental stages. This, of course, does not factor in the indigenous populations who later reclaimed their cratered landscapes, or continue to anxiously await clean-ups to return ‘home’ to abandoned municipalities that still remain hazardous for continuous human and animal habitation. The populations of relocated Marshall Islanders, indigenous Aboriginal communities, and inhabitants of Semipalatinsk Test Site, all possess very distinctive experiences of other nations’ weapons testing.
The uncomfortable reality of anthropogenic radiological waste is ideally a legacy we would not wish to be known for. However the deep-time lifespan and proliferation of such toxic, ionising radioisotopes and contaminated infrastructure, across all terrestrial environments, will likely ensure elements of this inheritance will be remembered by posterity nonetheless – either through potent unintentional exposure events within these environments, like in the nightmare case of Goiânia, or through our responsible attempts to mitigate these risks, and preserve knowledge of their underlying presence deep inside the landscape across generations. For instance, the measured half-life of Plutonium-239 – a toxic isotope that does not exist in nature – is 24,110 years, highlighting the apparent deep-time reach of these risky material legacies. After 100,000 years have passed, a quarter of this material will still remain hazardous to biological health. Human life, at the speed of this radioactive decay rate, may seem like a fleeting affair – especially if exposed to radioactivity. This fissile material is also a heavy metal poison, burns when exposed to oxygen at room temperature, and tends towards reaching critical mass when dissolved in concentrated solutions and storage volumes – critical excursion accidents which emit lethal amounts of neutrons and gamma rays. The criticality events from this material are still the most common cause of radiological accidents today. Enriched quantities of Pu-239 alone are readily apparent in global environments as a result of weapons testing programmes, in addition to the reprocessing facilities that produced and stored it.
OUR RADIOLOGICAL REALITY
The inconvenient lifespan of many radiological isotopes pose multitudes of physical, economic, political, moral, ethical, psychological, and technical challenges for contemporary civilisations living out their lives under the perceived benefits and risks of these technologies. Certainly there are benefits; besides hazardous waste, and the initial intensive phases of extraction and reprocessing for fuel elements, nuclear power is a proven ‘clean’ carbon-free energy source that could aid societies to transition towards greener technologies. But, perhaps, the clearest implications for the use of these substances is the perennial risk they may pose for the silent majority of future generations who do not directly benefit from, or ‘have a say’, over their present-day use, but will, nevertheless, inherit these 'time-orphaned' wastes from our deposition behaviours. At present, there are substantial international conversations and articulate designs to responsibly secure and varyingly isolate low, intermediate, and high level wastes, in addition to developing risk management strategies and pioneering safeguards that may adequately prevent accidental human exposure to these materials for periods of geological time. These are examples of ‘Good Ancestor’ efforts, as characterised by the philosopher Roman Krznaric. One particularly salient example of this deep-time planning, is the Onkalo spent nuclear fuel repository; a deep geological repository on Olkiluoto Island, designed to store such fissile materials for approximately 100,000 years until radioactivity levels have sufficiently degraded to a less lethal state – a timescale in our species' ancestry comparable to the record of etched ochres, and early pigment workshop instruments found at Blombos Cave in South Africa.
Much of these discussions concern the development and materials testing of geological depositories, in addition to producing storage solutions, and signposting of these purposeful hazardous radioactive caches using architectural features, abstract linguistic and semiotic markers, alongside a plethora of other creative proposals to simply forewarn an suspecting future discoverer. There is little agreement on the effectiveness of one strategy over another, and even less consensus on whether there are any moral or legal obligations for individual nations to collectively mark their hazardous sites. Perhaps, a consequentialist argument of harnessing acute radiation sickness could be the most significant indicator to deter broader human intrusion into the hazardous depths of our atomic graveyards. But such proposals remain contentious as they are predicated on the exposure ‘of the few’ counterweighted against the spread of hazardous radiological materials outside of the proposed internment structures which are designed to safeguard everyone. However, much of this archival and marker work, to date, has centralised upon the development of preventative barriers for isolating specific depositories or burial sites, rather than conveying the scope of these interrelated legacies as part of a broader, collective material heritage – both purposeful depositing practices, but also the range of unintentional waste heritage too. Understanding the extent of this radiological heritage for ourselves, is perhaps crucial for us, before mapping these experiences onto any semiotic signs to communicate this essential information in isolated 'bites' to posterity – in addition to also simply keeping track of these depositories.
FOOTNOTING FOR POSTERITY
As part of the After the Horizon library, and our effort towards retaining the memory of essential information, the foundation is studiously compiling the extended catalogue ‘Radiological Heritage: A quantitative survey of radioactive waste, deposition, contamination, remediation, and apparent long-term legacies’. The catalogue, presently consisting of over 6,000 unique entries across several defined categories, intends to fundamentally redress several near-immediate to deep future applications. Firstly, the catalogue is formalised as a third-party directory for identifying the emergent impacts and recognised legacies from present-day technological applications – essentially, to provide an evolving overview of the various
threads now comprising our radiological heritage from several international and trans-industrial services. The directory will also aim to progressively chronicle remediation operations worldwide, while integrating this information into a digital platform for further public education and engagement with these protracted legacies as a secondary goal. Finally, the assembled catalogue will be used as a starting point for addressing the semiosis dilemma of adequately communicating the scope of this essential information across intervals of deep time in classic ‘disrupted’ information-exchange archaeological devices (see the Companion Guide to Earth for the foundation’s approach), or as a formal component of living memory-retention customs, while also contributing to best-practice guidelines for conveying information across generations. Simply put, to understand the problem to communicate, we need to initially understand its vast purview.
Notes to the catalogue: The Radiological Heritage catalogue is compiled to map known geophysical regions with elevated radiation levels arising from documented anthropogenic sources, with emphasis placed on inheritance from the terminal phase of the nuclear fuel cycle for transuranic materials in storage, distribution, disposal sites (intentional or otherwise), and occurrences of contaminated regions. The diverse contents are compiled through peer-reviewed academic studies, third-party literature, and international journalist investigations, in addition to occasional freedom of information requests. As such, it does not document active defensive networks, and waste systems denoted under 'classified' restrictions, nor does it track defined ‘orphan’ radioactive sources (by definition, an impossibility). Given the obscure history for some of these accounts, there are some instances of conflicting information present throughout the archive. In the case of some security-sensitive sources of radiological materials and active sites, the exact coordinates have been generalised. Locations are defined as physical sites with elevated radioactive levels, but some zones of atmospheric releases and liquid effluence discharges have been detailed, due to the significance of environmental fallout. No judgements on defining a tolerance dose, or exposure metrics for human or animal health, have been applied to these logged incidences. The entire catalogue remains an active document, subject to updates, amendments, and peer-review.
Page last updated: 21 Oct 2021