Radioactive ants, flies and gnats have been found at the Hanford nuclear complex, bringing to mind those Cold Warera B horror movies in which giant, mutant insects are the awful price paid for mankind's entry into the Atomic Age.
Officials at the nation's most contaminated nuclear site insist there is no danger of Hanford becoming the setting for a '90s version of "Them!," the 1954 movie starring James Arness and James Whitmore in which huge, marauding ants are spawned by nuclear experiments in the desert.Although Hanford is working to eradicate its "hot" insects, officials said the radioactivity the pests carry is slight and no threat to neighboring communities.
"We're not dealing with an insect that would leave and all of a sudden start to give birth to these malformed, horrible insects," said a chuckling Richard Zack, an entomologist at Washington State University in Pullman.
The situation came to light in September when red harvester ants found underground near some old waste pipes were discovered to be radioactive. Then, earlier this month, workers discovered radioactive flying insects around cans where the staff's day-to-day nonradioactive garbage is thrown away.
That led Fluor Daniel Hanford, the company that manages Hanford for the Energy Department, to check the town dump where Hanford garbage is taken. Workers found trash that had apparently become radioactive from contact with the bugs, and sent 210 tons of it back to Hanford for burial.
Still, a person would have had to stand next to a spot contaminated by radioactive bugs for an hour to get the level of exposure equal to a dental X-ray, said Mike Berriochoa, spokesman for Fluor Daniel Hanford.
And the house-size ants of "Them!" are "physical impossibilities" and just the stuff of science fiction, Zack said.