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| STUNG! On Jellyfish Blooms and the Future of the Ocean Lisa-ann Gershwin Sylvia Earle (Fwd.) Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, May 2013 |
Rating: 5.0 High |
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| ISBN-13 978-0-226-02010-5 | ||||
| ISBN-10 0-226-02010-X | 424pp. | HC/FCI | $27.50 | |
The increasingly frequent jellyfish blooms are causing a variety of problems: wiping out salmon mariculture, putting popular bathing beaches off limits, displacing food fish. But the most serious (so far) is their impact on anything which depends on the sea for cooling water. That includes desalination plants and plants that liquefy natural gas as well as power plants of all kinds.
Here, extracted from the author's Table 1 in the Appendix, is a list of some power plants that jellyfish have shut down.1
| DATES | Power Plant | Problem Description | Species |
|---|---|---|---|
| I added the Sual plant to this list and removed Oman LNG which as the name implies liquefies natural gas. | |||
| 1963 | Tokyo, Japan | Power plant intakes along Tokyo Bay clogged | Aurelia aurita |
| 1967-1971 | Tuggerah Lakes, New South Wales | Intake screens of Munmorah Power Station clogged | Catostylus mosaicus |
| 1972 | Tokyo, Japan | Electricity shut down by jellyfish bloom | Medusae |
| 1974-1978 | Gothenberg, Sweden | Numerous reactor shutdowns at Ringhals NPP due to intake clogging; some intake screens damaged | unspecified |
| 1977 | Karratha, Western Australia | Cape Lambert PP shut down due to intake clogging by red jellyfish | unspecified |
| Pre-1983 | Barsebäck, Sweden | Barsebäck NPP has problems with jellyfish at intake pipes. | unspecified |
| Pre-1983 | Denmark | Intake problems due to jellyfish reported by power stations. | unspecified |
| Pre-1983 | Germany | Intake problems due to jellyfish reported by power stations. | unspecified |
| 1983 | Hutchinson Island, Florida | Manual scram of Unit 1 at St. Lucie NPP when jellyfish blocked intake pipes. | unspecified |
| 1983-1989 | New Delhi, India | Jellyfish repeatedly cause Madras NPP to shut down. | unspecified |
| Aug. 1984 | Hutchinson Island, Florida | Manual scram of Unit 2 at St. Lucie NPP when jellyfish blocked intake pipes. | unspecified |
| Sept. 1984 | Hutchinson Island, Florida | Both reactors at St. Lucie NPP shut down for several days by jellyfish. | unspecified |
| Sept. 1984 | Florida City, Florida | Both reactors at Turkey Point NPP shut down for eleven days by jellyfish. | unspecified |
| Pre-1986 | Tanagwa, Japan | Jellyfish quantities up to 150 tons/day removed form Tanagwa PP. | unspecified |
| Pre-1989 | Takasago, Japan | Coal-fired PP shut down to remove 165 tons of jellyfish in one day. | unspecified |
| Aug. 1991 | Hunterston, Clyde Sea, Scotland | Gas-cooled NPP shut down by thousands of jellyfish in intake pipes. | unspecified |
| 1992 | Hunterston, Clyde Sea, Scotland | The NPP was shut down by a Rhizostoma jellyfish bloom in intake pipes. | Rhizostoma |
| Sept. 1993 | Hutchinson Island, Florida | Unit 1 reactor at St. Lucie NPP twice scrammed because of jellyfish. | unspecified |
| 1995-1996 | New Delhi, India | Shutdowns of Madras NPP cost roughly $122,000 per day as up to 18 tons of jellyfish are sucked into the plant monthly. | unspecified |
| July 1999 | Kashiwazaki, Japan | Sudden surge of jellyfish caused operators to reduce power at all 3 reactors of Kashiwazaki Kariwa NPP. | unspecified |
| Dec. 1999 | Luzon, The Philippines | Coal-fired Sual Power Station shut down by 50 truckloads of jellyfish. Outage affects 40 million people for 18 hours. | unspecified |
| May-Aug. 2001 | Gyeongsang-buk-do Province, South Korea | Numerous jellyfish problems at Uljin NPP. | unspecified |
| Summer 2001 | Hadera, Israel | Tons of jellyfish removed from cooling system of large Israeli NPP. | unspecified |
| Aug. 2005 | Oscarshamn, Sweden | One of three NPP reactors shut down by jellyfish clogging intake pipes. | unspecified |
| June-July 2006 | Chalk Point, Maryland | Generating station at Chalk Point impaired by twice-weekly jellyfish removal from outer nets. | unspecified |
| July 2006 | Calvert Cliffs, Maryland | Unit 1 reduced to 40% power by jellyfish in coolant pumps. | unspecified |
| July 2006 | Hamaoka, Japan | Jellyfish clog two reactors at Chubu Electric Power's NPP for three hours. | unspecified |
| Pre-2007 | Niigata, Japan | To combat jellyfish at Higashi-Niigata PP, engineers developed an automated removal system. | unspecified |
| October 2008 | San Luis Obispo, California | One reactor at Diablo Canyon NPP was shut down, the other at half-power, for three days due to jellyfish. | Aurelia labiata |
| Pre-2009 | Perak, Malaysia | Jellyfish caused problems at Manjung coal-fired PP and other plants nearby. | unspecified |
| 5 July 2010 | Ashdod, Israel | Five coastal PPs were affected by hundreds of tons of jellyfish. | unspecified |
| 28 June 2011 | Lothian, Scotland | Moon jellyfish shut down the two reactors at Torness NPP for two days. | unspecified |
| Aug. 2011 | Hutchinson Island, Florida | In addition to shutting down St. Lucie NPP for two days, jellyfish remains killed 75 endangered goliath groupers. | unspecified |
| July 2012 | Chubu, Japan | Over a 9-day period, 24,000 tons of jellyfish in Ise Bay threatened 9 power plants and caused 3 to cut power. | unspecified |
Some of these are described in greater detail in her Chapter 1. But you can get a good idea of the impact from just scanning the table. Needless to say, it is not small, considering the loss of revenue that a day or two of plant outage represents — to say nothing of the cost of removing the jellyfish and repairing any damage they caused. Then of course there is the customer dissatisfaction.
In certain cases, loss of power from one plant can cause a ripple effect which disrupts an entire country. I am not referring to cascading power outages like the one that hit the northeast U.S. in 1965.2 The author describes one such case on pages 13-14. This did involve cascading outages, but it also threatened political unrest. On 10 December 1999, some fifty truckloads of jellyfish were sucked into the seawater cooling system of the Sual Power Station, and 40 million people on the island of Luzon were plunged into darkness. Because President Joseph Estrada had been only a year in office, fears of a coup swept the Philippines. But power was restored the following day and the crisis passed.
To contact Chris Winter, send email to this address.