Empty Radioactive Wasp Nests Bug Cleanup Workers

YAKIMA, Wash. — If workers cleaning up the nation's most contaminated nuclear site didn't have enough to worry about, now they've got to deal with radioactive wasp nests. Mud dauber wasps built the nests, which have been largely abandoned by their flighty owners, in holes at south-central Washington's Hanford nuclear reservation in 2003.

That's when workers finished covering cleaned-up waste sites with fresh topsoil, native plants and straw to help the plants grow _ inadvertently creating perfect ground cover for the insects to build their nests. Nearby cleanup work also provided a steady supply of mud, which the wasps used as building material.

Today, the nests, which could number in the thousands, are "fairly highly contaminated" with radioactive isotopes, such as cesium and cobalt, but don't pose a significant threat to workers digging them up.

"You don't know what you're going to run into, and this is probably one of the more unusual situations," said Todd Nelson, spokesman for Washington Closure Hanford, the contractor hired to clean up the area under the oversight of the U.S. Department of Energy.

As for the wasps themselves, they're largely long gone _ the insects don't reuse their nests when they colonize each spring.

The federal government created Hanford in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb.

The site produced plutonium for the first atomic blast and for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of World War II, and plutonium production continued through the Cold War.

The work left a mess of radioactive and hazardous waste to be cleaned up next to the region's largest waterway, the Columbia River. The effort is expected to last decades and cost more than $50 billion.

Workers started using excavators three weeks ago to dig up the wasp nest-infected area, including vegetation that had already been replanted. Because they are in enclosed cabs on the excavators, no protective clothing is required.

The material is then placed in a container and taken to the onsite landfill for slightly radioactive wastes, said Dave Martin, the company's radiological engineer.

Comments

[Weirdwriter]

02:30 AM on 06/15/2009

Expect the making of a SciFi channel movie "based on a true story" any day now.

Where is Adrienne Barbeau when we need her?

[elmerfude]

08:24 PM on 06/15/2009

I always thought she was pretty hot.

[research]

01:14 AM on 06/15/2009

it's a little suspicious how the "natural" background levels in the uSA were just 130 mrem in the 1970,

but now are listed as 360 mrem per year.

http://www.animatedsoftware.com/hotwords/background_radiation/background_radiation.htm

[elmerfude]

10:03 AM on 06/15/2009

I do not consider this link to be credible and objective as a scientific paper. The concluding rant casts questions on its credibility.

[research]

03:07 PM on 06/15/2009

Neither do I, but check his links, they are correct.

[Talossa]

12:46 AM on 06/15/2009

I see a superhero coming...

[kidlucky]

12:09 AM on 06/15/2009

Did anyone else catch that the article said "As for the wasps themselves, they're largely long gone'

what does largely mean?

[Tom95134]

01:58 PM on 06/13/2009

Damn, another nuclear power to deal with.

[DailyElitist]

06:32 PM on 06/14/2009

Don't worry, Cheney's on it.

[mergina]

10:10 AM on 06/13/2009

So cool if some of those giant bug movies of the 50's came true.....and giant green canaries too.

[plaidsportcoat]

03:26 AM on 06/13/2009

"the nests, which could number in the thousands, are "fairly highly contaminated" with radioactive isotopes,"

Do those nose-pickers even have a brain? An intelligent six year old could have figured that out by observing and ruminating about how things in the same environment are connected. Hey face it. Men are ruining the whole world. Why not let women and children run the world for the next 25 years??
Or do we need to a.r.m. ourselves and take over from yas?

[Z-Liberator]

05:36 AM on 06/13/2009

scary!

[elmerfude]

02:38 PM on 06/13/2009

Hysteria rules sportscoat. I worked at Hanford for 24 years as a scientist and manager. I can assure you I did not spend my time picking my nose. One of my groups was responsible for contaminated animals and plant problems. You need to understand should you chose to bother that the Hanford site dates back to WWII and the Cold War when the nation was in a hurry to produce weapons for the nuclear stockpile. Of course there were no real environmental regulations and not much understanding of radionuclide transport via ecological pathways since nuclear science was being invented from scratch at the time. Shortcuts were taken at the time resulting in a number of environmental problems at Hanford. My group dealt with a lot of problems just like this one. Maybe I should write a book. But we devised methods to control the problems and steady progress has been made to cleanup the site. I had a number of PhD ecologists and other specialists on my staff and I can assure you that their understanding was better than a sixth grader--yours is another matter. The wastes at Hanford has nothing to do with commercial reactor waste. Commercial reactor waste is much easier to deal with.

[plaidsportcoat]

03:21 AM on 06/13/2009

"the nests, which could number in the thousands, are "fairly highly contaminated" with radioactive isotopes,"
Do these nose-pickers have a brain? It would take an intelligent six year old to predict stuff like this happening. Ya know, kids that look at insects and nature and ruminate about the connections between things on the earth? Hey face it. Men are ruining the planet. Please let women and children run the world for the next 25 years, do our bidding, and see how much BETTER it all will be?!! Or do we have to get weaponized and take over?

[frantaylor]

04:33 PM on 06/12/2009

Yet more proof that we humans are incapable of dealing with nuclear materials.

[patrickhenrypress]

07:05 PM on 06/12/2009

No. We could solve this problem. What we do have is irresponsible corporations, a military that doesn't give a you-know-what about polluting and a government paid to look the other way until the problem becomes so massive even the corporations and the military can't continue on doing business as usual and they are forced to deal with it.

There is no sensible way to deal with these problems because "sensible" does not describe our corporations, military or government when it comes to profits. Solutions are damaging to profits, you see.

Makes you wonder when this nation is going to give up the toxic waste of deregulated capitalism for an approach which benefits the citizens, not the corporations. So many laws have been passed to protect corporations, the military, the police and anyone with a bag of money, yet so few to benefit the people. How distorted a democracy can become when its legislators and courts decide corporations are more important than "we the people" this nation was supposedly founded for.

[elmerfude]

03:06 PM on 06/13/2009

You are a little confused patrick. The Hanford site is owned and operated by the government (DOE). Most of the work is contracted out to private contractors but they are strictly regulated by DOE. The work at Hanford is put out to competitive bid. DOE is obsessed with safety. The corporations I worked for at Hanford were never irresponsible in any way. The government has spent billions cleaning up Hanford since WWII and will spend billions more for several more decades. The whole operation is also overseen by the Washington State Department of Ecology. I don't see an effort at environmental cleanup of this magnitude as being irresponsible or having anything to do with evil corporations.

[elmerfude]

06:21 PM on 06/13/2009

Complete nonsense. This isn't proof of anything of the kind. Nuclear materials have been capably dealt with for decades.

[Whatevah]

10:23 PM on 06/13/2009

I agree with you, Elmer. The lessons learned at Hanford explain why nuclear material has been handled so safely for so many decades. It is a remarkably safe industry - now.
Thanks.

[research]

07:47 PM on 06/14/2009

and during that time the world background radiation levels have roughly doubled. the world dumps nuclear waste in the oceans, releases it into the air, loses entire sub reactors off the costs, and generally makes a radioactive mess of things.

[Antifascist-08]

04:20 PM on 06/12/2009

Wasn't this in a movie in 1957?

Giant radioactive killer bees?

[CaptainFailmore]

06:54 PM on 06/12/2009

Just wait until they grow to the size of dogs and start shooting lasers from their eyes. Just you wait.

[patrickhenrypress]

07:09 PM on 06/12/2009

If it continues to take an eternity to clean up our toxic way of life, then yeah. They'll even mutate into planet-eating zombies capable of interstellar flight...

[KillTheMessenger]

04:20 PM on 06/12/2009

Nuclear energy is really cheap... until you get the bill for the cleanup.

:-)

[NL207]

02:21 PM on 06/13/2009

The Hanford site has nearly zero to do with peaceful nuclear energy. The items stored there are almost entirely military in origins, the largest mass being decommissioned naval propulsion reactors, mostly from scrapped nuclear submarines. These do not represent commercial power.

Nuclear energy is still cheaper than wind and solar.

[elmerfude]

02:59 PM on 06/13/2009

You are correct that the Hanford site does not have to do with commercial reactor waste. There are cores there from nuclear submarines but they do not constitute the largest mass of the waste by any means. They are relatively easy to deal with compared to some of the other wastes there. The DOE Hanford website has a lot of good information.

[SpaghettyIrish]

12:54 AM on 06/15/2009

Cite facts and statistics to prove that last sentence please, or at least provide links.