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Title: Jellyfish Swarm Forces French Nuclear Plant To Shut

Link: https://hardware.slashdot.org/story/25/08/11/...

AmiMoJo shares a report from the BBC: A French nuclear plant temporarily shut
down on Monday due to a "massive and unpredictable presence of jellyfish" in
its filters, its operator said. The swarm clogged up the cooling system and
caused four units at the Gravelines nuclear power plant to automatically
switch off, energy group EDF said. The plant is cooled from a canal connected
to the North Sea -- where several species of jellyfish are native and can be
seen around 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 because of their "gelatinous" bodies. "They were able to evade
the first set of filters then get caught in the secondary drum system," he
told the BBC. Mr Tanguy, who works at the WNA, said this will have created a
blockage which reduced the amount of water being drawn in, prompting the
units to shut down automatically as a precaution. He stressed that the
incident was a "non-nuclear event" and more a "nuisance" for the on-site team
to clean up. For local people, there would be no impact on their safety or
how much energy they could access: "They wouldn't perceive it as any
different to any other shut-down of the system for maintenance."

Read more of this story at Slashdot.

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