Wasps Can Hurt You. A Radioactive Wasp Nest Can’t.
How to Distinguish the Important from the Merely Novel
By Matthew L. Wald and P.J. Seel
On July 3, 2025, workers at a nuclear weapons plant run by the Department of Energy (DOE) in South Carolina found a wasp nest near a tank of radioactive waste. After they used insecticide to kill the wasps, they discovered that the nest was radioactive. Soon they found three other radioactive nests.
So they bagged the nests as radiological waste. The nests were outside of regular cleanup operations, so they went back to work, stabilizing wastes from decades of nuclear weapons production. But the news was splashed over the web, newspapers, and broadcast media for days.
Why?
The DOE report on the incident does not have specifics, but wasps generally build nests from wood that they chew and digest. Some legacy waste materials, especially cesium and strontium, are absorbed into trees like two more ordinary elements they resemble, potassium and calcium, which are essential minerals for all living organisms. Nest building could have concentrated the isotopes even further. All the wasps had to do was choose one particular tree that had absorbed long-lived isotopes (Sr-90 and Cs-137 both last about 300 years before decaying to levels that are immeasurable), to make a bright little spot on an environmental survey.
In reality, the insecticide was probably more of a threat than the radiation. And the wasps themselves were a hazard; wasp, hornet and bee stings kill more than 60 people a year according to the Centers for Disease Control (almost entirely due to allergic reactions). Radiation, on the other hand, kills approximately zero people. But from the perspective of news and public interest, the story hits three key points: animals, radiation, and originality. It would still be a mistake, though, to ascribe much public health significance to the discovery.
Animal stories always play well, especially in periods when editors are looking for something—anything, really—to break the monotony of news of brutal wars, strife in the streets, heat waves, and economic uncertainty. Radiation always plays well, too. Combine them both and you have a phenomenon, like reports of genetic variations in wild dogs near Chernobyl, the site of the 1986 explosion of a Soviet reactor and significant release of radioactive materials. It also explains the continuing appeal of Blinky, the three-eyed fish that Bart Simpson, the cartoon character, caught in a pond near the Springfield nuclear plant.
One of us (Wald) has been seduced by the combination of factors, writing about rabbit feces with traces of radiation, located from a passing helicopter, and testing of tumbleweeds, which, before they tumble, have exceptionally deep roots that can pull radioactive materials out of the dirt. The Savannah River Site where the wasp nests were logged, is where weapons materials were formerly made. Checking wildlife for radioactive contamination isn’t new; hunters are allowed to take deer on the grounds, but they have to submit the antlers to Energy Department technicians who check for radiocesium. The technicians have never found much.
Significantly, this radioactive material is leftover from the Cold War production of weapons material. That stuff really is oozing goo, (but not green or glowing, as the Simpsons satirically suggest) unlike the mostly solid (ceramic, in fact) radioactive materials from civilian power operations. The waste was handled with the apparent haste needed in the 50s and 60s to stop Godless Communism. (If you’re under 40 years old, you may need to look that up. We won’t explain it here. It’s enough to say that the operations that led to the creation of this waste ceased in the 1990s.) Savannah River isn’t alone; at the contaminated Hanford site, workers have also logged a radioactive rabbit.
However, Thumper and Bambi can turn up with trace amounts of radioactive materials because of Cold War practices at government weapons sites similar to the environmental mismanagement which led to the toxic chemical dump at Love Canal in New York. That crisis affected hundreds of families and prompted the Superfund Act and ensured “cradle to grave” responsibility for waste. The weapons sites will require a lot of work, but the exposures are nothing compared to what the public faces from many commercial chemical sites.
Why The Impact is Limited
Exposure to radiation is classified as either external or internal. External exposure, such as dental x-rays or cosmic radiation is just the energy coming from outside of your body and getting absorbed as it goes through. Internal exposure can come from ingestion, inhalation, or injection of radioactive materials such as getting a medical procedure with radioisotopes or radon gas in your home. Wasps aren’t a part of the human food chain, though, and very few people eat a lot of wild rabbits.
But it drives interest. The Associated Press wrote about the radioactive wasps nests, and the report was picked up around the country and abroad.
When is it time to start worrying about radiation? This is an open question, because for decades regulators have used a conservative assumption, still unprovable after seven decades of research, that there is no threshold of safe radiation exposure. The Trump administration’s recent executive orders instruct the Nuclear Regulatory Commission to re-examine that assumption. It may not actually be conservative, if it inhibits the use of nuclear technology and the result is substitution of other ways to make energy or deliver treatments that are demonstrably much worse. The official position of the Health Physics Society, the professional organization that represents the field of radiation safety, is that risk is not detectable below 100 mSv (10 rem). That is 100 times the dose that the NRC allows for the public. Assuming that the nest was just a chunk of Cs-137, instead of a wasp nest, someone would have had to have kept their face three feet away from it for almost 19 days to even reach the public dose limit. But if it was full of wasps, who would want to be next to it for even 10 seconds?
The NRC makes a distinction that can get confusing. It doesn’t limit exposure to radiation—it limits exposure to man-made radiation. So, you can build your house on a mountaintop, above much of the atmosphere that shields us from cosmic rays, and get as much dose as you like, but the dose from the americium in your smoke detector is regulated.
In the case of the contaminated wasp nest, maybe it’s the flip side of the old question: if a tree falls in the forest and there’s no one there to hear it, does it make a sound? In this case, there was no dose, and the tree fell silently. (For there to be a dose, you’d have to be foraging the wasps.) But compared to some environmental risks that are better documented, like lead contamination in the water, or mercury in fish or food, radiation is just, well, sexier and scarier. The immediate effects of lead poisoning and long-term radiation are both invisible, but only one of them can make a Geiger counter ping in a way that most people can recognize instantly. Leaded gasoline and paints caused irreparable harm to millions of Americans but if the same amounts of radiation were emitted by cars, soldiers would have been called to close the highway system.
The public focus on radiation isn’t always because of the perception of threat. The public follows radiation news partly because radiation is so easily detected, but that can also be an advantage. In South Africa, conservationists are injecting the horns of endangered rhinoceroses with radioactive Cobalt-60, so that if the animals are poached for their horns, the smugglers will get caught by radiation detectors at the airports. The radiation can be detected even in a horn hidden in a 40-foot shipping container but blood tests on the animals confirm that the exposure is too small to affect their health. Due to success, it is now being tested to prevent pangolin poaching as well.
That one, like the wasps, combines animals and radiation. If it stops the rhinoceros’ march toward extinction, it will certainly be more important than the news about the wasps. But the media won’t play it that way.