Hive of radioactive WASPS found at nuclear site by officials
Startled officials found that the nest clocked in at 100,000dpm, a moderately high radiation level, US outlet WYFF noted.
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Disintegrations per minute (dpm) is the unit used to measure the rate at which a radioactive substance emits radiation.
The report from the US Department of Energy revealed that Radiological Control Operations uncovered a wasp nest attached to a post near a tank at the Savannah River Site in Aiken, South Carolina.
The nest has been described as "onsite legacy radioactive contamination", instead of being a loss of radioactive control.
This means the nest is radioactive as a result of past activities, and not a result of a leak.
While the Department has not detailed how the nest became contaminated, it has assured that the ground and surrounding area have not been contaminated.
After being discovered on 3 July, the nest has since been sprayed and bagged as radiological waste to be destroyed.
'The delay in reporting was to allow time for reviewing previous wildlife contamination for consistency in reporting criteria,' the report stated.
No other operations were affected by the discovery, The Independent reported.
The site was constructed in the 1950s to produce the materials needed to build nuclear weapons during the Cold War.
But cleanup and environmental efforts began in the 1980s after it was declared a Superfund site - a contaminated location that poses potential threats to public health and the environment.
It is not the only case of radioactive wildlife inhabiting contaminated zones, with Norwegian reindeer becoming contaminated following the fallout of Chernobyl.
Elsewhere in South Carolina, researchers have been monitoring radiation in turtles in the Mohave Desert and the Savannah River.
Pacific Northwest National Laboratory researcher Cyler Conrad, who has been monitoring the turtles, told National Geographic: 'So many different turtles at so many different sites were shaped by nuclear activity that occurred at those locations."
He added: 'I did not have a full appreciation for how widespread those nuclear signals are in the environment.'
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Daily Mail
10 minutes ago
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The Guardian
2 hours ago
- The Guardian
Jim Lovell obituary
Just after 9.20pm, Houston time, on Monday 13 April 1970, Jim Lovell, who has died aged 97, looked out of the left side window of Odyssey, the command module of the Apollo 13 lunar mission. Caught in the sunlight was what looked like smoke, which Lovell believed, correctly, was oxygen. It was pouring out of the service module, the technological core of the spacecraft. Lovell and his fellow crew members, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert, were 205,000 miles from Earth. Thirteen minutes earlier, a muffled explosion had rocked Apollo 13 and Lovell now realised that 'we were in serious trouble' and, unlike Apollo 11's Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin, or Apollo 12's Pete Conrad and Alan Bean, he would never fulfil his life's ambition to walk on the moon. Indeed the issue for Lovell, the commander of Apollo 13, had now become whether he and the other two astronauts would even walk on Earth again. The catastrophe – the culmination of a series of earlier technological and maintenance errors on Earth – risked turning the Odyssey into Nasa's mausoleum, destined to orbit moon and Earth indefinitely, with its three astronauts inside. Almost nine months had elapsed since Apollo 11 and Armstrong's 'giant leap for mankind'. Apollo 12 had followed in November 1969. By the time Apollo 13 took off, media space fatigue had set in. At 9pm on that fateful Monday the astronauts had completed a live broadcast to Earth – which went largely unwatched. Given the choice between Lovell and co and the Doris Day Show, CBS had opted for Doris, and neither NBC nor ABC had carried the transmission. Apollo 13 was approaching its target in the moon highland area of Fra Mauro. There, Lovell and Haise were set to board the lunar module, Aquarius, and land on the moon, leaving Swigert orbiting on the Odyssey. But when Swigert flicked a switch for a routine 'cryo-stir' of the liquid oxygen and hydrogen tanks in the service module that provided the spacecraft with air, water and electricity, a short circuit led to a fire, which led to an explosion in oxygen tank two – and tank one was leaking. At 9.08pm Swigert uttered the words that, with a change of tense – made for the 1995 film Apollo 13 – went into history: 'OK Houston, we've had a problem', a phrase echoed seconds later by Lovell. Neither mission control nor the crew could initially work out what that problem was. Intense debate ensued, in space and in Houston. The 20-mile cloud of gas and detritus could be seen from Earth. What followed was an extraordinary display of heroism and ingenuity. In a fraught operation the command module was shut down, conserving its internal batteries (and hence power for re-entry to Earth's atmosphere) and by the end of that day Lovell and his comrades had moved into their 'lifeboat', the lunar module, with minimal power and water. The craft then looped around the moon and, early the following morning, fired the lunar module's descent engine to alter the trajectory. Passing around the moon, the astronauts reached the greatest distance from the Earth ever achieved by human beings, 248,655 miles (more than 400,000km). Lovell later realigned the craft and fired the descent engine to target the south-west Pacific recovery area. Odyssey – used as a 'bedroom' by the crew – was no warmer than a refrigerator. The interior of Aquarius, meanwhile, was covered in condensation, 'three men cold as frogs in a frozen pond' was Lovell's description. All three men became dehydrated, and Haise contracted a kidney infection. Aquarius, designed to carry two men for two days, had to carry three, for four. On the Wednesday, in a piece of masterly improvisation devised between Houston and Apollo 13, the astronauts constructed a purifier to cut potentially lethal carbon dioxide levels. Later that day Lovell honed the trajectory to ensure the craft hit the middle of the 10-mile-wide entry corridor into the Earth's atmosphere – the alternatives were death in orbit or burn-up. Exhausted and severely dehydrated, Lovell repeated the operation early on the Friday morning of touchdown. At 7.14am the service module was jettisoned. At 10.43am, with the lunar module Aquarius evacuated and the crew back on Odyssey, Aquarius was jettisoned. At 12.07pm Odyssey splashed into the Pacific, 6.4km from the recovery ship USS Iwo Jima – from whose decks wafted the strains of Aquarius, a song from the musical Hair, played by the ship's band. 'As long as we were still breathing and had methods to figure out solutions to our predicament,' Lovell recalled a quarter of a century later, 'we kept going.' Lovell was born in Cleveland, Ohio, the son of Blanche (nee Masek), and James Lovell. His father, a coal furnace salesman, was killed in a car accident when Jim was five, and he and his mother moved to Milwaukee. The boy was fascinated by rocketry, and by the pioneers of the interwar and wartime period. As a teenager at Juneau high school in Milwaukee he built – and launched – his own rocket. His uncle had been a first world war naval flier and, while in his senior school year, Lovell applied to the US Naval Academy at Annapolis, Maryland – but was turned down. Money was tight, so he applied for, and was accepted on, the navy's Holloway plan, which gave him two years of a free engineering course at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, plus flight training, sea duty and a commission. After two years it also led a senior officer to suggest to Lovell that he should renew his application to Annapolis. He was accepted, wrote his thesis on liquid fuelled rocketry, graduated in 1952, and soon afterwards married his childhood sweetheart, Marilyn Gerlach. After serving on the aircraft carrier USS Shangri-La he spent four years as a test pilot at what was then the Naval Air Test Center in Patuxent, Maryland, managing the McDonnell Douglas F4H Phantom jet fighter programme. He was also safety officer with Fighter Squadron 101 in Oceana, Virginia. Lovell applied for, and was turned down, by Nasa, for its Mercury programme, which, between 1962 and 1963, focused on getting astronauts into orbit. This was the height of the space race; the Soviet Union had been first into space with the Sputnik satellite in 1957 and in 1961 sent Yuri Gagarin up as the first person to orbit the Earth. In 1962 Lovell was accepted for the Gemini programme, which developed lunar flight technology and demonstrated, for those who were watching, that the Soviet venture, though big on rocket muscle, lagged in space science. Lovell's first flight was piloting Gemini 7, with Frank Borman, in 1965 on a record-breaking 14-day Earth orbit that included a rendezvous with Gemini 6. The following year he commanded Gemini 12 on the last Gemini mission. The first manned lunar mission, Apollo 8, at Christmas 1968, brought Lovell, together with Borman and William Anders, to global attention. It also raised morale in a year that had seen the Vietnamese Tet offensive, Martin Luther King and Bobby Kennedy assassinated, and urban uprisings across the US. Apollo 8 orbited the moon 10 times. Lovell and his colleagues read from Genesis to the 'good Earth' on Christmas Eve, were made Time magazine's men of the year, and their pictures appeared on stamps. That flight, the Guardian's Anthony Tucker reported at the time, had 'been as near to perfection as the most optimistic could have dreamed'. Then, for Lovell, came the flight of Apollo 13, which, after the initial media indifference, turned into a global event because of the drama involved. By the time he embarked on the mission, he had already spent a record-breaking 572 hours in space; his eventual tally, 715 hours and five minutes, was not exceeded until after the advent of the Skylab space station in 1973. Apollo 13 was, however, the end of Lovell's space career. Less than three years later he left Nasa and went into business in Houston. 'Our mission was a failure but I like to think it was a successful failure,' he said, and indeed, as a triumph over adversity, it was. It also ended the era that had begun with President John F Kennedy's declaration in 1961 that by the end of the decade the US should land a man on the moon and return him 'safely to the Earth'. Armstrong and Aldrin had fulfilled that pledge, but Lovell's adventure reminded Americans of the cost of the lunar programme and it posed the question, with the Soviet Union long out of the race, of what it had all been for. There were four more Apollo landings, but, as Gerard DeGroot wrote in Dark Side of the Moon (2007): 'Of all the lunar missions, probably 99% of Americans can recall only two: Apollo 11 and Apollo 13 – the first one and the nearly disastrous third one. The others have faded into obscurity and insignificance.' For years Nasa seemed reluctant to talk about Apollo 13, which irritated Lovell, who never lost his dream of walking on the moon. He was, another astronaut was reputed to have said, 'the Captain Ahab of outer space'. It took Ron Howard's film – Lovell liked Tom Hanks's portrayal of him, although he thought Kevin Costner would have been a better lookalike – to elevate Lovell and his comrades, justly, to the American pantheon. Lovell co-wrote the book, Lost Moon (1994), on which the movie was based, and had a fleeting on-screen role – greeting Hanks on the Iwo Jima – at the end of the film. Much earlier he made an appearance in The Man Who Fell to Earth (1976), starring David Bowie. Lovell's wife, Marilyn, died in 2023. He is survived by their children, Barbara, James, Susan and Jeffrey, 11 grandchildren and nine great-grandchildren. James Arthur Lovell, astronaut, test pilot and businessman, born 25 March 1928; died 7 August 2025
