...when workers finished covering cleaned-up waste sites with fresh topsoil, native plants and straw to help the plants grow _ inadvertently creating perfect ground cover for the insects to build their nests. Nearby cleanup work also provided a steady supply of mud, which the wasps used as building material.

Today, the nests, which could number in the thousands, are "fairly highly contaminated" with radioactive isotopes, such as cesium and cobalt, but don't pose a significant threat to workers digging them up.

"You don't know what you're going to run into, and this is probably one of the more unusual situations," said Todd Nelson, spokesman for Washington Closure Hanford, the contractor hired to clean up the area under the oversight of the U.S. Department of Energy.

As for the wasps themselves, they're largely long gone _ the insects don't reuse their nests when they colonize each spring.

The federal government created Hanford in the 1940s as part of the top-secret Manhattan Project to build the atomic bomb.

The site produced plutonium for the first atomic blast and for the bomb that was dropped on Nagasaki, Japan, at the end of World War II, and plutonium production continued through the Cold War.

The work left a mess of radioactive and hazardous waste to be cleaned up next to the region's largest waterway, the Columbia River. The effort is expected to last decades and cost more than $50 billion.

Workers started using excavators three weeks ago to dig up the wasp nest-infected area, including vegetation that had already been replanted. Because they are in enclosed cabs on the excavators, no protective clothing is required.

The material is then placed in a container and taken to the onsite landfill for slightly radioactive wastes, said Dave Martin, the company's radiological engineer

What a cute story...what some, in centuries to come, might call a "slice of life." But, instead of saying something like "oooh," or "ahhh," the readers might be shaking their heads at our stupidity. Hidden beneath this story are some pertinent facts:

1. Note the "mess of radioactive and hazardous waste" left behind after the site shut down.
2. Note the amount of money it will cost today's taxpayers to clean it up and the amount of time it will take to remediate the site - $50 billion over decades.
3. Note where the radioactive wastes are stored - on site.

This is the way that radioactive sites are remediated. Nothing about this methodology has changed, other than the fact that there are more sites to clean up now than there were a century ago. And, if the uranium mining industry has its way, there could be many more sites to clean up in the next half century.

My daughter, by the way, isn't happy about paying taxes for problems the previous generation left behind.