Jellyfish Cluster Shuts Down Nuclear Reactor, Scientists Don’t Know What to Do

A huge cluster of jellyfish has forced one of the largest nuclear reactors in the world to shut down after it caused a blockage in the pipes.

The Oskarshamn nuclear plant closed its third reactor for the second time in a week after a large wave of jellyfish blocked the pipes that bring in cool water through the plant's turbines, according to the Associated Press.

"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, according to the Associated Press. "But it's very difficult to say if there are more jellyfish, because there is no historical data."

The pipes have been cleared of jellyfish and engineers are preparing to restart the reactor, which at 1,400 megawatts of output is the largest boiling-water reactor in the world.

This isn't the first time workers at the plant have been forced to close reactors due to jellyfish, and marine biologists say the issue could become more common around the world.

"This is not unusual," said Anders Osterberg, a spokesman for OKG, the plant operator, to Nyheterna.net. "It has previously struck O1 and O2 when we had surface water intake."

Last year, the California-based Diablo Cnyon facility was forced to shut reactors after gobs of sea salp, a gelatinous, jellyfish-like organism, clogged intake pipes, according to the Associated Press.

Moller said the biggest issue isn't monitoring the jellyfish in the Baltic Sea, but producing data that scientists need to figure out how to prevent the problem.

"There are filters to stop this and we have all the reason to consider what we can do to prevent this," said Osterberg. "It is a known problem, but the issue is that it was such enormous quantities this time."

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