The US Department of Energy has reported the discovery of a radioactive wasp nest at one of its facilities in South Carolina that was once involved in the production of parts for nuclear weapons.
According to a 22 July department report, the contaminated nest was discovered at the facility – the Savannah River site – on 3 July near tanks used to store liquid nuclear waste.
It said the nest was sprayed and was disposed of as radiological waste, and that testing confirmed radiation levels “greater than 10 times the total contamination values” that federal regulations allow.
The contaminated wasp nest was the result of “onsite legacy radioactive contamination” and “not related to a loss of contamination control”, the Department of Energy stated in the report.
“The ground and surrounded area did not have any contamination,” it said, concluding that no further action was required.
Thee Savannah River Mission Completion, which oversees the site, confirmed to the local Aiken Standard newspaper that its radiological control staff discovered the test “while performing routine radiological monitoring activities”.
It said the nest was sprayed and surveyed for contamination, according to procedure.
“While no wasps were found on the nest, the individual insects would have significantly lower levels of contamination,” it said.
“Upon discovery of the contaminated nest, the immediate area was secured and surveyed; no contamination was found in the area. There were no impacts to workers, the environment or the public.”
It noted that the site is near the center of the 310-sq-mile site.
“Generally, wasps travel only a few hundred yards from their nest,” it said.
The executive director of the Savannah River Site Watch watchdog group, Tom Clements, told the Associated Press this week that he was “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”.
According to the Department of Energy, the Savannah River site was built in the early 1950s and “focused on the production of plutonium and tritium for use in the manufacture of nuclear weapons from its inception in the early 1950s until the end of the Cold War”. In 1992, the facility began focusing instead on environmental cleanup, nuclear materials management, and research and development.
The area where the nest was found – known as the “F-Area Tank Farm” – contains 22 underground carbon steel tanks, with each tank reportedly capable of holding 750,000 to 1.3m gallons (2.8m to 5m litres) of radioactive waste, according to the Aiken Standard.
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