Residents in South Carolina have been left shocked after a highly radioactive wasp nest was found at a former US nuclear weapons production site.
Strangely, though, no sign of any wasps has been uncovered.
According to a new report from the US Department of Energy (DOE), the unusual discovery was made on 3 July at the Savannah River Site (SRS) near Aiken, South Carolina.
The site, which once produced plutonium and tritium for nuclear bombs during the Cold War, is now mainly focused on environmental cleanup and the storage of leftover radioactive waste.
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Routine safety checks led to workers stumbling upon the nest perched on a post close to large underground tanks that still store millions of gallons of liquid nuclear waste.
Radiation readings showed levels roughly ten times higher than federal regulations allow.
However, officials insist there’s no indication that the nearby tanks were leaking.
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Instead, the DOE believes the nest’s contamination likely came from what’s known as “legacy contamination” — leftover radioactive residue from the site’s bomb-making past that somehow made its way onto the nest.
The DOE’s report stated: “The wasp nest was sprayed to kill wasps, then bagged as radiological waste. The ground and surrounded area did not have any contamination.”
Strangely, no wasps were found on or around the nest. A statement from the Savannah River Mission Completion, reported through the Aiken Standard, added that if the insects had been present, they would probably have carried “significantly lower levels of contamination” than what was detected in the nest itself.
Despite these reassurances, watchdog group Savannah River Site Watch has slammed the official report as incomplete and unsatisfactory. Tom Clements, the organisation’s executive director, told the Associated Press: “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.”
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The contaminated nest was found in the F Tank Farm, an area that houses 22 huge underground tanks, each capable of holding between 750,000 and 1.3 million gallons of nuclear waste.
Officials overseeing the site stressed that the nest’s discovery does not pose a risk to people living outside the facility, as wasps typically fly only a few hundred yards from their nests, and the tank farm is well within the boundaries of the sprawling 310-square-mile complex.
The DOE admitted that the report on the incident, which was only made public on 27 July, had been delayed to allow time for a review of past incidents involving contaminated wildlife and to meet strict federal reporting rules. The agency added that “no further action was required in the field” and that the discovery has “no impact on other activities and operations” at the site.