The top nuclear cleanup official at the Department of Energy’s Savannah River Site Friday sought to ease public concern over radioactive wasp nests found last month at the federal complex near Aiken, S.C.
“The U.S. Department of Energy is managing the discovery of four wasp nests with very low levels of radioactive contamination that have been found at the Savannah River Site, (SRS),” Edwin Deshong, who heads the SRS field office for the DOE Office of Environmental Management.
“The nests do not pose a health risk to SRS workers, the community, or the environment,” Deshong said in a statement emailed to Exchange Monitor. “Work will continue at the SRS where we are fully committed to ensuring the health and safety of the workers and the community.”
But the director of Savannah River Site Watch, Tom Clements, is skeptical. The organization is a frequent critic of DOE and SRS.
“The radioactive wasps are harbingers of bigger problems at SRS,” Clements said in a statement posted on the group’s website. The bigger problems, according to Clements are “massive amounts of high-level nuclear waste, site contamination, a shift to plutonium pit production (requiring shipment of and the dangerous processing of plutonium) and a DOE facility that just can’t be honest with the public.”
A radiological control staffer discovered the first wasp nest while conducting monitoring on July 3 in the F Tank Farm area at the 310-square-mile Savannah River Site. Tests showed the wasp nest with radiation contamination. The news was initially reported last week by South Carolina media and was later picked up by national news outlets, including the Washington Post.