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Millions of Jellyfish Invade Nuclear Reactors
oxide7 writes "A nuclear reactor in Japan was forced to shut down due to infiltration of enormous swarms of jellyfish near the power plant. A similar incident was also reported recently in Israel, when millions of jellyfish clogged the sea-water cooling system of a power plant."
I have a theory that jellyfish are alien invaders, here to xenoform our planet. They love basically everything we do to the planet, from pollution to overfishing to global warming. This is just further evidence, but by shutting down nuclear reactors, the only current viable alternative to fossil fuel power plants, they ensure we use more coal and oil power plants, contributing to the environmental change they love.
-mrxak
Onions Will Kill You
We over-fished the oceans, and now jellyfish have all that extra food available to themselves to grow like weeds. Don't act surprised.
Table-ized A.I.
The Torness reactor was shut down on June 28th because jellyfish clogged the seawater inlet filters.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2011/jun/30/jellyfish-shut-nuclear-reactors-torness
Up Next:
Radioactive Jellyfish spotted
Up Next after that:
Man stung by radioactive jellyfish, gains superpowers. New crime-fighting "Jellyman" reduces world crime considerably.
A friend of mine used to work as a deep diving welder. Things get pretty cold when you've got that much water between you and the sun, so they'd pump down warm water from the surface to let the divers stay under for as long as possible.
Some of the divers discovered they could get even warmer by sticking the hoses into the neck of their wetsuit. After a few weeks of doing so, a number of jellyfish swam near the surface. You can probably guess what happened next -- one of them got sucked into the pump and shot through the hose, straight down the back of his wetsuit and settling right between his legs.
It took a few days before he was able to walk after that, and probably a week more before he could do it comfortably. I guess he was lucky they weren't a more deadly variety, and that he had a buddy nearby to help him surface and remove his wetsuit.
Jellyfish clogging marine heat exchangers is a common problem at sea, but is of particular concern for US Naval vessels using nuclear propulsion. Typically the only fix is to open the exchanger and manually clean the stuff out. Some ships have a capability to flush with either low pressure steam or reverse flush with firemain water (although the firemain is now also likely to contain jellyfish). How these multi-billion dollar machines are designed without a method for removing dead jellyfish is beyond my comprehension.
I've eaten jellyfish in China. Reminded me of chewing on rubber bands without the flavor.
Historically, we didn't have a population problem. China reflects the population growth of the entire world. Until about 1850, population growth was a stable thing, growing fractionally every century or so. After about 1850, we saw this exponential growth.
The reason I picked China as the example, is that China has made a conscious effort to control population. One couple, one child. Negative population growth, which should put China comfortably within the land's capability to support their population within the next 100 years or so. (Sorry, no, I haven't researched projected population figures - I'm just guesstimating that 100 years from now, China's population will be (very roughly) about 1/4 what it is today.)
Roughly half of the rest of the world still practices unrestrained population growth - all of Islam, all of the Catholic people, and much of the third world no matter their religion, politics, or anything else.
I think it's past time that some of those people were brought up to date on the results of unrestricted procreation.
"Windows is like the faint smell of piss in a subway: it's there, and there's nothing you can do about it." - Charlie Br
they have profoundly disrupted the balance between male and female, leading to social unrest and massive mental health problems.
the idea that there is insufficient land is bogus as long as we are paying farmers to not grow things. there is plenty of food, the problem is distribution and marketing. we throw away food every day from supermarkets and restaurants, and people go to jail if they try to dig in the trash for food to eat. there is no food shortage, there is a shortage of low-priced food, and that has nothing to do with the supply of land (except maybe as it relates to ethanol). it has to do with things like the Goldman Sachs Commodity Index Fund and other investment banks and hedge funds attempts to manipulate food markets for profit . . . something that is very old, a good 20th century example being the potato market and NYMEX.
the problem with 'population control' is that someone has to decide what 'sort of people' are 'better' - nobody who thinks they know the answer to that should ever be in any position of power because it is amongst the basest, most primitive and violent impulses of the human species, to 'wipe out the other clan'.
see also. eugenics. t4. genetic health courts. etc etc.
Three words: Japanese bagpipe music.
How is this flamebait? What Tablizer says is true. The fish that are the normal predators of jellyfish have been overfished, along with a lot of the smaller fish they feed on. What results is an abundance of the food that jellyfish eat along with an absence of predators (including the human predator), which causes a surge in jellyfish numbers.
If I have seen further it is by stealing the Intellectual Property of giants.
Its Japan, nothing a bunch of scantily clad Japanese schoolgirls cant handle.