The shadows on the wall look like a railroad track, I wonder if he’s ever comin’ back
Four nuclear reactors in Japan, Israel and Scotland were forced to shutdown due to infiltration of enormous swarms of jellyfish, which clogged the plant’s cooling system.
Such massive invasions of the jellyfish species have raised speculations and scientists are trying to figure out the reason behind such unusual growing trends.
Recent studies have found out that jellyfish blooming occurs mostly during the summer and spring months. This may partly explain why the three recent power plant incidents happened in close succession. The conditions brought on by climate change may also be creating more jellyfish blooms than there used to be.
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Graham said there have been dozens of cases of jellyfish causing partial or complete shutdowns of coastal power plants in the past few decades, as well as shutdowns of desalination plants. Steve Haddock of the Monterrey Bay Aquarium Research Institute said a power plant in Australia was shut down by jellyfish as long ago as 1937. Such events aren’t surprising; all these plants draw water out of the ocean, and they are already fitted with filtration devices called flumes that remove jellyfish and other debris.
“Only when you have a huge influx of jellies do they overwhelm the flumes,” Graham told Life’s Little Mysteries. This happens when a jellyfish bloom — a huge swarm of adult specimens brought together by ocean currents — flows into a power plant’s filtration system.
