In a bizarre and unsettling discovery, workers at South Carolina’s Savannah River Site found a radioactive wasp nest near storage tanks holding liquid nuclear waste, according to a recent report from the U.S. Department of Energy.
The nest, discovered on July 3, tested at 10 times the federal radiation limit, though officials were quick to assure the public there’s “no danger to anyone.”
Still, that didn’t sit well with watchdog groups, according to the Associated Press.
The site, once a critical hub for producing parts for nuclear bombs during the Cold War, is now primarily involved in nuclear fuel production and cleanup efforts. But legacy contamination — radioactive material left behind from its bomb-making days — still haunts the grounds.
Officials said the wasp nest, found on a post near the tank farm, had no live wasps, and it was quickly sprayed, removed, and disposed of as radioactive waste.
They added there was no evidence of a leak from any of the 43 still-active underground tanks.
But critics aren’t buying the all-clear just yet.
Tom Clements, executive director of the Savannah River Site Watch, said the official report fails to explain some very basic — and very important — questions.
“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,” he said in a text message.
The watchdog group pointed out that the type of wasp nest could provide critical clues. Wasps that build with dirt versus other materials could help trace the exact source of the contamination — if someone bothered to investigate it properly.
The Department of Energy attributed the radiation to “onsite legacy radioactive contamination.”
Savannah River Mission Completion, the company now managing the site, released a statement claiming that the wasp nest did not pose any risk beyond the facility’s boundaries, since wasps typically travel only a few hundred yards.
They also added that had any wasps been present, they would have carried “significantly lower levels of radiation than their nests.”
That’s not exactly comforting.
With more than 165 million gallons of liquid nuclear waste generated at the site since the 1950s — now reduced to about 34 million gallons through evaporation — concerns about containment are far from over.
Eight tanks have been permanently closed. Forty-three remain in active use.
Meanwhile, watchdogs are demanding more transparency — and maybe, a little more urgency — about how a wasp managed to get itself caught in a radioactive nightmare in the first place.
