Radioactive wasps have been found at a nuclear facility in South Carolina. Radiological Control Operations found a wasp nest on a post close to a tank at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, according to a report from the U.S. Department of Energy.
The nest was sprayed to kill the wasps and bagged as radiological waste, officials said. After probing the nest, they found that it was at 100,000 dpm, a moderately high radiation level, WYFF noted.
The discovery was made just before 2 p.m. on July 3. “The delay in reporting was to allow time for reviewing previous wildlife contamination for consistency in reporting criteria,” the report stated.
The nest is viewed as “onsite legacy radioactive contamination” and not connected to a loss of control when it comes to contamination.
Legacy radioactive contamination is the remaining contamination from previous activities. The Department of Energy didn’t cite any other reasons behind the contamination of the wasps, with the officials noting that the ground and surrounding area did not have any contamination.
The finding didn’t impact other operations at the 310-square-mile facility. The site was constructed in the 1950s to produce the materials needed to build nuclear weapons during the Cold War, such as tritium and plutonium-239.
After becoming a Superfund site for the Environmental Protection Agency, cleanup and environmental remediation efforts began.
There are other examples of radioactivity affecting the animal world, with sea turtles becoming radioactive in the waters surrounding the Enewetak Atoll between Australia and Hawaii. Following the capture of the atoll during World War II, the U.S. tested nuclear weapons at the site 43 times. They subsequently buried the waste in a concrete tomb that has started to leak, National Geographic notes.
In German forests and Japanese mountains, radiation has affected animals across the globe.
“Nature does not forget,” Vienna University of Technology radiochemist Georg Steinhauser told the outlet.
Large parts of the radioactive contamination across the world came after superpowers conducted tests as they raced to create devastating weapons during the 20th century. For instance, the U.S. tested nuclear weapons on Enewetak Atoll between 1948 and 1958.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researcher Cyler Conrad told National Geographic, “I did not have a full appreciation for how widespread those nuclear signals are in the environment.”
Conrad has studied human-related radiation in turtles in the Mohave Desert, the Savannah River in South Carolina, and the Oak Ridge Reservation in Tennessee. “So many different turtles at so many different sites were shaped by nuclear activity that occurred at those locations,” said Conrad.
Wild boars in the forests of Bavaria, at times, have high levels of radiation, with scientists long believing that it stemmed from the 1986 nuclear meltdown in Chernobyl, Ukraine. However, Steinhauser found alongside his team that 68 percent of the contamination in boars in the area stemmed from global nuclear testing. The boars became contaminated after eating truffles, which had absorbed radiation from nuclear fallout that had settled in the ground.
