Okay, now this is straight out of a sci-fi B-movie—except it’s real. And it’s happening in South Carolina. We’re talking radioactive wasps. You heard me. Not radioactive waste. Not just a nest. “Radioactive. Wasps.”
So let’s rewind the tape a bit. This wild little incident went down at the Savannah River Site, an old nuclear weapons plant near Aiken, South Carolina.
This place used to crank out nuclear bombs back in the Cold War days, and while the bombs are long gone, the radioactive leftovers? Still hanging around.
Now picture this: It’s July 3. A team from the Department of Energy (DOE) rolls in to check radiation levels—just a routine day at a not-so-routine job. But surprise!
Instead of just reading the gauges and going home for the holiday weekend, they stumble across a wasp nest. Not just any wasp nest, folks. This one is sizzling with radiation levels “ten times” higher than what the feds say is safe.
Why? Because the wasps, apparently unconcerned with decades of human nuclear drama, decided to build their buzzing condo right around some tanks where liquid radioactive waste had been stored.
Now, don’t worry—DOE was quick to clarify that the tanks themselves didn’t leak. Nope. This radioactive bug palace was the result of “legacy contamination”, meaning leftover junk from the site’s more explosive past.
They hit the nest with insecticide—because even radioactive wasps hate a good spray-down—and then did the only thing you “can” do with radioactive bugs: disposed of the whole thing like it was nuclear waste. Because, well, it was.
Now before you start suiting up for a wasp apocalypse, officials are telling everyone to breathe easy. The surrounding ground tested clean. The air? No threat. And even if any wasps had flown off mid-mission, their contamination would’ve been ““significantly lower””—which is government-speak for “eh, probably not a big deal.”
Still, you gotta admit: Radioactive wasps? In a world where we’ve already got murder hornets and super pigs, this just feels like the next logical step in Earth’s villain origin story.
