Workers at a site in South Carolina that once made key parts for nuclear bombs have found a radioactive wasp nest, but officials said there is no danger to anyone.
Employees who routinely check radiation levels at the Savannah River Site (SRS) near Aiken found a wasp nest on July 3 on a post near tanks where liquid nuclear waste is stored, a report from the US Department of Energy said.
The nest had a radiation level 10 times what is allowed by federal regulations, officials said.
Photo: AP
The workers sprayed the nest with insect killer, removed it and disposed of it as radioactive waste, while no wasps were found, officials said.
No leak from the waste tanks was found, and the nest was likely radioactive through “onsite legacy radioactive contamination” from the residual radioactivity left from when the site was fully operational, the report said.
The watchdog group Savannah River Site Watch said the report was at best incomplete as it does not detail where the contamination came from, how the wasps might have encountered it and the possibility of another radioactive nest if there is a leak somewhere.
Knowing the type of wasp nest could also be critical — some wasps make nest out of dirt and others use different material which could pinpoint where the contamination came from, Tom Clements, executive director of the group, wrote in a text message.
“I’m as mad as a hornet that SRS didn’t explain where the radioactive waste came from or if there is some kind of leak from the waste tanks that the public should be aware of,” Clements said.
The tank farm is well inside the boundaries of the site and wasps generally fly just a few hundred meters from their nests, so there is no danger they are outside the facility, Savannah River Mission Completion, which oversees the site, said in a statement.
If wasps had been found, they would have significantly lower levels of radiation than their nests, said the statement, which was given to the Aiken Standard.
The site was opened in the early 1950s to manufacture the plutonium pits needed to make the core of nuclear bombs during the start of the Cold War. Now the site has shifted toward making fuel for nuclear plants and clean up.
The site generated more than 625 million liters of liquid nuclear waste, which has, through evaporation, been reduced to about 129 million liters, Savannah River Mission Completion said.
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