Ya’ gotta’ love this:
… That could only mean one thing: There was a cottontail on the loose with access to sensitive nuclear material.
Containing stray radiation at an old nuclear complex is a big deal. Especially for the military … which … um … isn’t always very good at setting everything back up just the way it was.
They've also chased down at least 30 atomic tumbleweeds so far in 2010, found among the thousands of tumbleweeds …
Ninety-nine percent isn’t good enough:
… In recent years, "we're averaging less than five [radioactive] animals out of the more than 2,000 sampled every year."
Horton even detected a who:
… In 1998, after workers with Geiger counters detected hot spots in a dumpster full of old cantaloupe rinds, Mr. Johnson sent a technician out to investigate.
She homed in on a radioactive speck. "Her meter was going up, and all of a sudden the speck flew away," Mr. Johnson says. "She called and told me about it, and I said 'Yeah, right.'"
Mr. Johnson soon learned the specks were radioactive fruit flies. His team traced the flies back to a box with pipes used to transfer waste. It was sealed with a sugar-based coating that contained radioactive material. The flies had noshed on the sealant and flown the radiation to the dumpster.
Read the whole thing, entitled “Bunnies Are In Deep Doo-Doo When They ‘Go Nuclear’ at Hanford: Detectives at Old A-Bomb Plant Track Radioactive Critters, Rogue Tumbleweeds” in The Wall Street Journal.
*That title would make a great name for a website or a band.
