Radioactive wasp nest discovered in US: Routine check findings at Cold War-era nuclear facility; radiation levels 10 times above limit

Workers at a former US nuclear weapons facility in South Carolina have uncovered a radioactive wasp nest emitting radiation levels ten times higher than regulatory limits, reports the BBC.

Routine radiation checks at the Savannah River site near Aiken discovered a wasp nest early July, positioned on a post near tanks storing liquid nuclear waste .

"The wasp nest was sprayed to kill wasps, then bagged as radiological waste ," according to a US Department of Energy report released last week.

Officials said that no wasps were found at the site near Aiken, South Carolina. They confirmed that the waste tanks are not leaking, and currently, there are no wasps present at the site.

"No contamination was found in the area," the report confirmed. "There were no impacts to workers, the environment or the public,"

Investigators believe the dangerously high radiation levels found on the nest are the result of "onsite legacy radioactive contamination", residual radiation left behind from the site's Cold War-era operations, when it was actively involved in producing components for nuclear weapons, reports the BBC.

While the nest showed high radiation levels, the wasps that once occupied it would have carried significantly lower levels of radiation, the report said.

The report says that wasps usually don’t travel far from their nest—just a few hundred feet. Since the nest was found inside the 310-square-mile facility, it’s unlikely that the wasps flew outside the site.

The Savannah River site originally began operations in the 1950s and produced plutonium for nuclear bomb cores. The site remains active to this day focusing on nuclear materials for power generation.

The site originally produced over 625 million liters of liquid nuclear waste, which has since been reduced to approximately 29 million liters through evaporation. Currently, 43 underground tanks remain in use, while eight have been closed, as per the Savannah River Mission Completion.