(Not) Fun fact: Brazil has had one of the worst nuclear accidents in history and it happened in my hometown, Goiânia.
It's known as "The Cesium-137 Accident" ("O acidente do Césio-137" in Portuguese), and it's a Level 5 in the nuclear accident scale. For reference, Chernobyl was a 7.
A couple garbage collectors wandered into an abandoned hospital, looking for anything worth collecting and selling. They came across a radiotherapy machine, and tore it apart, looking to sell its parts.
They found a capsule containing a powder that glowed a bright blue, especially in the dark. It was a radioactive isotope of cesium, used in radiotherapy at the time. They took it home to look at, and in a couple days fell ill.
It ended up in a family's home and they broke the capsule to touch the powder, and some of the children even played with it, putting it on their faces and pretending it was makeup.
Soon enough lots of people would visit that home to look at the strange blue powder, until all members of the family became severely ill. One of their children, Leide das Neves, ended up ingesting the powder, because she ate a meal without washing her hands, after playing with it.
Soon enough the local government isolated the area and took everyone they could track as having come into contact with the material to be tested for radiation, except they weren't informed of what was happening. Imagine being taken away from your home with a bunch of other people, taken to a strange place, being scanned with a strange device that if it beeped, would cause you to be isolated. 112,000 people were examined for radioactive contamination with 249 having significant levels of radioactive material in or on their body.
Leide died within a few days. She was buried in a lead coffin and no one came to her funeral, fearing contamination. Goiânia was known for being the town of "radioactive hillbillys" for many years after, due to how its location was in the center of the country. This happened in 1987.
