Power plants feel sting of jellyfish hordes
WASHINGTON — The jellyfish are coming and energy plants may be powerless to stop them.
Blooms of the translucent sea creatures clog power plants worldwide, threatening to shutter operations. Last week, a coal-fired power plant in Rutenberg, Israel, worked hard to unclog its filters from a nearby swarm that could have shut down its cooling system, Haaretz reported.
“Our coal-fired power stations are located by the sea because it takes a lot of water to cool them down,” Israel Electric Corp (IEC) spokeswoman Iris Ben-Shahal said. “At that entry point of the water into the cooling systems, we have filters to keep foreign bodies out. The jellyfish, and other things like sea plants, stick to the filters and clog them.”
While IEC stayed open despite the swarm — workers managed to get them unclogged in time — other power plants haven’t been so fortunate. In 2013, a giant swarm of moon jellyfish shuttered the world’s largest boiling-water reactor, in Sweden. The same thing happened at the plant in 2005.
This happens more often than you’d think; about two or three times a year, jellyfish blooms cause serious problems for power, desalination and other plants, according to Lucas Brotz of the University of British Columbia’s Institute for the Oceans and Fisheries. “In some cases, it has caused nuclear power plants to have near meltdowns,” Brotz said.
“I wouldn’t say jellyfish are doing this intentionally.”
Massive blooms of jellyfish inadvertently get stuck in the plants, which suck in ocean water to cool their systems. Sometimes that water has a bunch of jellyfish in it. Some of the blooms “can almost look like they’re more jelly than water,” Brotz said.
Brotz explained how humans can be exacerbating the rise in blooms, such as with overfishing that removes jellyfish competitors and predators.
Jellyfish also survive better than most marine life in dead zones, oxygen-depleted spots in the ocean that can come about because of pollution.