Once ground zero for manufacturing the plutonium cores of America’s Cold War nukes, the Savannah River Site in South Carolina is now in the business of making nuclear plant fuel. But as of July 3, it’s also home to a nest of radioactive wasps, CNN reports.
In what sounds like the inciting incident that births a new Godzilla foe, workers performing routine radiation checks stumbled on a wasp nest near a cluster of liquid nuclear waste tanks. This one was clocking in at radiation levels ten times above federal safety limits. Fortunately, or unfortunately, depending on how badly you want to see giant monster wasps, there were no wasps inside.
Officials sprayed it with insecticide, scooped it up, and tossed it into the nuclear waste pile. The Department of Energy insists everything’s fine, blaming “onsite legacy radioactive contamination,” a bureaucratic way of saying that there is some lingering radioactivity hanging around. They claim that there is no leak and that there is no danger.
Radioactive Wasp Nest Found at Site Where U.S. Once Made Nuclear Bombs
Watchdog group Savannah River Site Watch is not satisfied with that explanation. Tom Clements, their executive director, wants to know what kind of wasps made the nest (some use dirt, others use wood pulp), because that could point to the source of the contamination.
Also, if this nest got cooked by ambient radiation, who’s to say there aren’t more out there? And can they distribute bread to local communities?
SRS officials countered that the site’s so locked down, any irradiated wasps would have died within a few hundred yards, well before they could terrorize the suburbs. Plus, they claim, if the bugs had been in the nest, they’d have been less radioactive than the best they lived in.
The site still contains 34 million gallons of treated-but-still-radioactive sludge in 43 underground tanks, which is a considerable amount but a significant decrease from the original 165 million gallons it used to generate.
We will update the story should any giant mutant killer radioactive wasps appear.
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