Huge cluster of jellyfish forces one of the world's largest nuclear reactors to shut down
- Swedish nuclear plant Oskarshamn was forced to close a reactor
- Jellyfish had blocked the pipes cooling down the plant's turbines
- After three days of cleaning reactor O3 reopened on Tuesday
A large cluster of jellyfish has forced one of the world’s largest nuclear reactors to shut down after it caused a blockage in the pipes.
Oskarshamn nuclear plant closed its third reactor for the second time in one weekend after a giant wave of jellyfish clogged the pipes that bring in cool water to the plant's turbines.
The plant in southeastern Sweden closed O3, which at 1,400 megawatts of output is the largest boiling-water reactor in the world.
Oskarshamn, southeastern Sweden closed O3 the largest boiling-water reactor in the world, as a result of the jellyfish invasion
This is not the first time operators at Oskarshamn have been forced to close reactors due to jellyfish, and marine biologists say could become more common across the globe.
By Tuesday, the pipes had been cleaned of the jellyfish and engineers were preparing to restart the reactor, said Anders Osterberg, a spokesman for OKG, the plant operator.
‘This is not unusual,' he told local newspaper Nyheterna.net. ‘It has previously struck O1 and O2 when we had surface water intake.'
‘There are filters to stop this and we have all the reason to consider what we can do to prevent this. It is a known problem, but the issue is that it was such enormous quantities this time.’
All three Oskharshamn reactors are boiling-water types, the same technology at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi plant that suffered a catastrophic failure in 2011 after a tsunami breached the facility's walls and flooded its equipment.
Dangerous wobbles: Tons of jellyfish blocked the pipes used to cool the reactor's turbines, a phenomenon that marine biologists say could become more common
Last year the California-based Diablo Canyon facility had to shut its reactor two after gobs of sea salp - a gelatinous, jellyfish-like organism - clogged intake pipes. In 2005, the first unit at Oskarshamn was temporarily turned off due to a sudden jellyfish influx.
Nuclear power plants need a constant flow of water to cool their reactor and turbine systems, which is why many such plants are built near large bodies of water.
Marine biologists, meanwhile, say they would not be surprised if more jellyfish shutdowns occur in the future.
‘It's true that there seems to be more and more of these extreme cases of blooming jellyfish,’ said Lene Moller, a researcher at the Swedish Institute for the Marine Environment. ‘But it's very difficult to say if there are more jellyfish, because there is no historical data.’
Moller said the biggest problem was that there's no monitoring of jellyfish in the Baltic Sea to produce the data that scientists need to figure out how to tackle the issue.
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