Wasp nest at US nuclear site tests ten times over safe radiation limit A wasp nest positively glowing with radiation was found at a Cold War-era nuclear weapons site near Aiken, South Carolina. A US Department of Energy report released last week casually dropped that a routine inspection had "discovered a wasp nest on a stanchion" near millions of gallons of liquid nuclear waste stored at …
Stung by a radioactive wasp, George H W Bush assumes his secret identity as WASP Man1 -- with superpowers of old money, a fancy prep school education, and Ivy League connections.
Okay, it needs work. . . I'll get back to you.
________________
Its... "The Sting". Super-power is tricking people into handing over their money. Unfortunately there is a long line of grifters ahead of them.
In the film they fool a powerful billionnaire into investing large amounts into a crackpot scheme to bankrupt the US economy using worthless tokens. Once the victim realises the consequences for his own fortune he attempts to capture The Sting and force them to return the money. All (financial) hell breaks loose. How much destruction ensues ? How does it end ?? Does anyone win ???
Now all it needs is a decent opening tune.
...hopefully not just capped with duct tape and good intentions.
Hell no! We have put up a "No Entrance" sign and indoctrinated all lifeforms that exiting the site, by any known or unknown means, is prohibited.
Leaving the area is punishable with mandatory $100k fines and 15 years imprisonment. Which bug would want that to happen. And, for what it is worth, we do have recyclable flypaper hanging around all over our site to keep the buggers in check and defend against unsanctioned events.
Most likely the wasps were experimenting with some sort of nuclear weapon. And what better place to do so than a site where nuclear waste is readily available? Since the wasps seem to have abandoned their lab, we can assume that they have perfected whatever device they were developing and have moved on to production at a larger and more suitable facility. Doubtless all this will be made clear in the not too distant future.
President Trump is currently removing blades from Windfarms and refitting them with a giant hardened mesh. A motion sensor will alert the Farms to the presence of said 'Nu-killer Wasps' and 'Swat' down in place. Asked to comment, the Trump administration were too busy dancing to YMCA and patting each other on the back.
We asked a spokesperson for renewable energy for a response but they were all on a 'training break in El Savlador'.
The President said, "We must do everything we can, everything humanly possible, to distract away from the Epstein files". No further comment was given.
The article reports 100,000 "disintegrations per minute" (dpm), which exceeds a regulatory level of 10,000 DPM by a factor of 10x.
A little research and I learned that millions to billions of disintegrations per second are required to cause harm to humans. This nest is literally thousands of times smaller than what is handled in medical or industrial contexts.
For example, a PET scan (commonly used for cancer diagnosis) is 100,000 times more activity than the wasp nest. A household smoke detector has around 20x more activity than the nest. Cancer treatments like brachytherapy is a million times more than the nest.
Bottom line: The wasp nest’s 100,000 dpm measurement was significant enough to require cleanup under DOE rules, and the "10x" multiplier makes for a good news story. But it was many orders of magnitude below the activity levels that would cause harm to humans.
That changes when one of them stings you. Then you have it in you. In your blood. Right next to your living cells, not on the skin with a few layers of protection. For the same reason strontium is extremely dangerous. Not when it is outside your body, but the chemical is a very close relative to calcium, and once your have it inside the body uses it to build bone structure, with a high probability right next to your stem cells since there is more fluctuation.
The numbers alone say not much, especially if you know ahead that those bees are radioactive and you can prepare to avoid getting stung, or breathing/eating the pollen/honey near/in their nests.
He mentioned a PET scan as having 100,000 times more activity. You know what you get that activity from? It isn't the scan, it is the radioactive dye they inject into you prior to the scan. So I'm still completely unconcerned about being stung by one of those wasps which would give me a tiny fraction of the radiation I'd get from a PET scan. OK well I would very concerned about getting stung, but the concern would be about the sting being painful, definitely not about the radiation!
"That changes when one of them stings you. Then you have it in you."
The venom might need to be mostly Polonium then. I expect they are measuring the entire wasp's nest rather than individual insects and then milking them to see what the dose would be in the case of a sting.
Yeah, but, giving the radiation levels in sane units likel the rest of the world uses does make it seem "big". " 100,000 disintegrations per minute" sound much larger than a 1600+ becquerels. It's why they measure trucks in lbs instead of tons. It's gotta be big numbers, even if you are measuring tiny things. Just ask Stormy Daniels.
(According to Wikipedia, "there is roughly 0.017 g of potassium-40 in a typical human body, producing about 4,400 decays per second (Bq)")
> "The wasp nest was sprayed to kill wasps,
Spray first, ask questions later? Did they kill other wasps, outside the nest? were the wasps already dead from the contamination? If the containment were not breached, how did the wasps get the contaminated material to build the nest? In fact, if the nest were more contaminated than the ground around the nest, it seems like the wasps *preferred* the contaminated material for some reason. Did it keep them warm through the winter?
They classified this as "original nuclear material" -- so are these wasps 30-50 years old??
I was surprised to learn that wasps were never in any of the cheesy 50s mutant giant insect drive-in flicks!
Heck, according to this Wikipedia article, if it can be trusted, there's only been one single 2015 movie featuring wasps.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_films_featuring_insects
Guess it's finally their turn?
Stung by a radioactive wasp that had no effect on his physiology at all, Dave felt shit for a couple of days but when he recovered he had become "MAN MAN"...with the ability to step over small obstacles with the greatest of ease and the strength of precisely one man Dave became the man he always was.
Spending 24 hours a day 7 days a week as his well known identity of "Dave the Plasterer" our hero moves from job to job in his "Plaster Mobile" with his trusty sidekick, radio, over quoting, under delivering and over ordering bags of plaster to increase his profit on the next job.
Marvel Presents...Dave: The First Tradesman.
Coming soon...
Dave: Age of Potholes
Steve: Gyprock
Dave: Civil Engineering
The Tradesmen: Infinity Holes
The wasps became radioactive from the ionizating radiation from the nuclear waste, not from the nuclear waste itself. So everything is fine there's, no danger from nucleat waste. We should focus instead on the real hazards like these bird eating, environment destroying wind mills in Europe, before it's too late. Think of the children!
"A US Department of Energy report released last week casually dropped that a routine inspection had "discovered a wasp nest on a stanchion" near millions of gallons of liquid nuclear waste stored at Savannah River Site (SRS) that "was probing 100,000 disintegrations per minute/100 square centimeters beta/gamma.""
In the maga world there is no health and safety, the report is "fake news" and created by "Biden and gang".
Good point and funny.
In fairness, mostly water evaporates and heavy metals are unlikely to tag along. It is an older technique of distillation known as 'jacking'.
That said, I wouldn't want to be downwind from the evaporative pool even if it has been carefully hidden underground.
The Hanford site at one stage was dumping kiloCuries of radioactive waste every week into the Hanford river:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hanford_Site#Environmental_concerns
The Savannah river's ecology is currently severely stressed by the toxic wastes which are caused by the human population:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savannah_River#Ecology
So putting things in perspective, when very typical soils around our houses measure of the order of a microcurie per cubic metre:
https://nvlpubs.nist.gov/nistpubs/Legacy/TN/nbstechnicalnote1139.pdf
I hardly think that finding three microcuries in a wasp nest is a big story.
There's more than that in my dad's old alarm clock, and a *lot* more in my smoke detector.
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