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, but don’t pose a significant threat to workers digging them up.
The government created Hanford in the 1940s as part of the Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb.
