Dive Brief:
- A swarm of jellyfish forced the shutdown of the Oskarshamn nuclear facility in Sweden earlier this week.
- Plant operator OKG was forced to shut down the 1,400-megawatt reactor on the Baltic Sea for two days after tons of moon jellyfish clogged the pipes that feed cool water to the unit's turbines.
- The peril posed by sea life to a nuclear plant is nothing new. Last year, the Diablo Canyon plant in Southern California closed after sea salp, a jellyfish-like organism, invaded the facility's intake pipes.
For your guilty pleasure, here's an overly dramatic (and utterly hilarious) animation of the jellyfish invasion:
Dive Insight:
Swedish biologists say sudden blooms of jellyfish are becoming more frequent, but because there is no historical data on jellyfish movements, it is difficult to say the population of jellyfish is growing.