DON’T CHANGE THAT DIAL: My favorite news story that took place during my recent hiatus was the invasion of Diablo Canyon Nuclear Power Plant up in Avila Beach by thousands of jellyfish, each the size of a basketball.

There is no evidence that any of these critters — so prehistoric and primitive that they lack either a respiratory or digestive system — came in contact with any radioactive materials while visiting the nuclear plant. But still, with so many filmmakers boasting bona fide Hollywood connections living in Santa Barbara, you’d have thought one of them might have connected the dots, however imaginary, to produce one genuinely new grade-B film. Instead, we have to wait with baited breath for such dreck as the remake of Creature from the Black Lagoon. And I loved the original.

Diablo spokesperson Sharon Gavin confessed she has no idea why the jellyfish invaded on October 21, but there were so many clogging the portals bringing cool ocean water into the plant — used to condense the steam created by the heat of nuclear power back into water — that they had to shut down one of the generators completely for two full days. How much that cost PG&E can only be guessed at. Ultimately, they had to get rid of the nettlesome little stingers the manual way — sending deep-sea divers down to scrape them off. The jellies have never been there before; they haven’t been back since. But jellyfish are on the prowl worldwide, pissed off and looking for trouble. Earlier this year, 70,000 humans hoping to get some R&R by sunbathing on the Mediterranean were forced to seek medical treatment for the stings inflicted by hostile jellies. In Japan, they claim, jellies the size of American football players are menacing their fishing industry. In Northern Ireland, a swarm of jellies the area of 26 square kilometers — and 10 meters deep — overwhelmed a commercial salmon fishery, killing every single salmon there. In Hawai‘i, they’ve been forced to close certain beaches. Along Oregon’s Pacific beaches, the story is much the same. And off the coast of Namibia, there are said to be three times more jellyfish than all the other underwater creatures combined. Get the picture: Be afraid; be very afraid.

My scaremongering friends within the scientific community inform me that the proliferation and invasion of jellyfish can be attributed to a dreaded new phenomenon known as “ocean acidification.” This is the hot new thing for people who’ve grown weary of getting freaked out by global warning and climate change, which have grown so drearily mainstream since Al Gore popularized them. The theory is that the ocean has absorbed astronomical quantities of carbon, which is stored at the lower depths until disturbed by currents that cause upwelling. This then scatters the carbon hither, thither, and yon, which changes the acidic balance of the water, making life extremely difficult for little creatures, or bigger creatures when they’re still little. Hence the arrival of species in places unexpected.

I have no idea whether this explains the jellyfish phenom. I just wonder why the Mothers for Peace —  whose job it is to make life miserable for Diablo Canyon — haven’t cited the jellyfish menace in their petitions to the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. Just last week, the Mothers filed yet another suit against Diablo Canyon, complaining that PG&E should be forced to prepare an Environmental Impact Report on what happens should the plant be the subject of a successful terrorist attack. Always sounded reasonable to me, but thus far, terrorist acts — like Acts of God — have been deemed exempt from such analysis on the grounds that it’s impossible to adequately prepare for either.

In the meantime, Diablo Canyon has plenty of other things to be worried about, like the brand-new offshore seismic fault just discovered about a mile off the coast from the plant. Diablo Canyon engineers working in conjunction with the United States Geological Survey reported just three weeks ago discovering what probably is a new sub-sea fault line that runs about 20 miles long and eight miles deep roughly a mile offshore from the nuclear power plant.

This research was instigated by the San Simeon earthquake on December 22, 2003, which registered 6.6 on the Richter scale, and left two people dead, 40 injured, and caused two sulfur hot springs to erupt like they were volcanoes. At that point, Sam Blakeslee — one of those rare moderate Republicans in the State Assembly who also happens to be a geophysicist — started to get ticked that we had lots more questions than answers about the fault lines running through the Central Coast. He started banging his fist, and this report ensued. Diablo officials are cautioning that this new fault line is only a “hypothetical” fault, saying more info is needed to conclude much of anything. Besides, they point out that Diablo was built to withstand a 7.5 quake, which is 10 times more mayhem than anyone thinks the Hosgri fault — located three miles off the Diablo Canyon coast — can produce.

That’s all up the road. Earlier this week, Platform A — located six miles off the coast of Carpinteria — sprung a pinhole-sized leak, out of which escaped nearly 1,500 gallons of crude oil into the ocean. Most of this, we’ve been assured, has been cleaned up already. How nice. It’s good to remember that Platform A was the notorious site of the oil spill of 1969, the great eco-disaster that didn’t so much give birth to the modern environmental movement, as is often claimed, but baptized it in black. The timing could not have been better. We are now approaching the 40th anniversary of this calamity (mark January 28 on your calendar). It was only a few months ago we heard, ad nauseum, how the oil industry now enjoys the technical expertise to avoid such mishaps. Guess what — we had it then, too. But human error reigns supreme and always will. In this case, it took the platform operators a full day to figure out where the leak was. I feel much better knowing that Congress and the president have lifted the moratorium on new drilling off our coast. Even politicians who knew better were stampeded into lifting the moratorium on account of the high gas prices. Guess what? Those have dropped now to a five-year low and the business sections of America’s newspapers are predicting gas might hit $1 a gallon before it’s through.

The good news is that we don’t have to worry that much about the jellyfish. The scariest threat is the one we confront every time we look in the mirror.

Related Links

• More Angry Poodle columns
• Jellyfish Shut Down Diablo Canyon Power Plant

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