Apparently the nest was vacant when discovered which does lead to the question of where the wasps went. No one at present seems to be reporting much detail.
Actually, an even scarier thing would be if it was like a science fiction story i once read (but can’t recall the titl of, or who wrote it) where a lot of little creatures end up radioactive like this, and when they all get together they exceed the critical mass/density and cause an explosion.
It’s unlikely that they’d be able to get a high enough density to cause a chain reaction, but they might be able to create a very hot region, the way nuclear waste in Chelyabinsk was thought to have concentrated by a sort of “soil chromatography” and got hot enough to cause a “mud volcano”.
I was surprised at the description that the wasps will be less radio-active than the nests. The wasps are known to concentrate heavy metals, and have been used as indicators of heavy metal poisoning:
