Jellyfish shut down nuclear power plant

iGuRu.gr > Jellyfish shut down nuclear power plant

A French nuclear power plant was temporarily shut down on Monday due to a “massive and unpredictable presence of jellyfish” in its filters, the operator saidThe swarm shut down the cooling system and caused the automatic shutdown of four units at the Gravelines nuclear power plant, energy group EDF said.

The station is cooled by a channel that connects to the North Sea – where many endemic jellyfish species are found and head to the coast when the waters are warm. According to nuclear engineer Ronan Tanguy, the marine animals managed to slip through systems designed to keep them out.

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"They were able to bypass the first set of filters and then get trapped in the secondary system," Mr Tanguy, who works at WNA, told the BBC. He said this reduced the amount of water being absorbed, prompting the units to automatically shut down as a precaution.

He stressed that the incident was a “non-nuclear event” but was more of a “nuisance” for the cleanup team that was there.

For locals, there would be no impact on their safety or the amount of energy they could access: “They wouldn’t perceive it as any different from any other system outage for maintenance.”