![]() Long story short, Vicente and Ricardo decided to disassemble the machine with the few tools and expertise they had: hitting it with a hammer. That particular model had been taken out of circulation because it had manufacturing defects. This radiotherapy machine had been bought illegally by the hospital from a company in Texas. Among loads of junk stored, they saw a machine that could give them some good money if they sold it in pieces. It all happened the night of December 6th, 1983, when Vicente Sotelo and Ricardo Hernández, two maintenance workers at the Medical Center of Specialties in Ciudad Juarez were allowed to take and sell whatever they wanted from the hospital’s warehouse. Known as the Cobalt-60 accident of Ciudad Juarez, a small and kind of stupid human mistake ended up contaminating almost an entire country and exposing thousands and thousands of people to the perils of radioactivity.Įngine head containing 1,003 curies of radioactivity The detonation Just a couple of years before Chernobyl, ignorance, corruption, and total lack of common sense led to one of the biggest radioactive accidents of all time, and definitely the worst in all the American Continent. So, Chernobyl might’ve passed through history as the worst nuclear incident, but it’s actually not the only one or even the worst, depending on how we measure these horrid events. If that’s not enough, we must say that it was this accident that made the world aware of the risks of radioactivity and nuclear reactions. Not only that, even today, the Chernobyl accident is still considered one of the worst nuclear disasters in history for the number of victims and how it was dealt with by the authorities at the time. HBO’s Chernobyl gave us a raw glimpse of the devastating consequences a nuclear reaction can have.
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