In an episode that evokes B-grade sci-fi movie plots from the 1950s, but actually reflects a continuing global problem, nuclear engineers in southeastern Sweden have been wrestling with a giant swarm of jellyfish that forced the shutdown of the world's largest boiling-water reactor.
The plant's operator said that over the weekend, a huge cluster of moon jellyfish clogged the cooling water intake pipes at the Oskarshamn nuclear power plant on the Baltic Sea coast, forcing the complex's 1,400-megawatt Unit 3 to shut down.
But Anders Osterberg, a spokesman for the operator, Oskarshamns Kraftgrupp AB, said Tuesday that the jellyfish had been cleared and that engineers were preparing to restart the reactor. The outlook was uncertain, he said.
"We hope we have solved the problem regarding the jellyfish, but we are not sure because they can come back," Mr. Osterberg said by phone. The species is known as the common moon jellyfish, a resilient type that can sting, but it is generally not dangerous to humans.
Mr. Osterberg said that the jellyfish had entered the pipes at about 60 feet below the surface of the sea, where the plant collects cold water to cool its reactor and turbine systems. They had not gotten past the plant's filters or come anywhere near the reactor, he said, and there was no risk of a nuclear accident.
There was a likely risk that the creatures would be killed by the pressure from the filtration system, he said, not from contact with any boiling water. "There will be no dinner of boiled jellyfish," he said.
Nuclear power plants are often placed next to large bodies of water, and jellyfish blooms are common even in waters that are not environmentally damaged, so jellyfish clogs are a recurring problem. Mr. Osterberg noted that the plant had a similar episode in 2005.
The Oskarshamn nuclear power plant uses the same technology employed at Japan's Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex, where a powerful earthquake and tsunami in 2011 caused the worst nuclear disaster since Chernobyl.
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