APPLICATION REPORT | POWER
FUEL FOR DEBATE
The world’s energy supply faces crisis. Climate change, and the war in Ukraine, are forcing a re-think of future supply. New sources will need new lifting gear. Julian Champkin reports.
invasion received around 40% of its gas from Russia, via the existing pipelines, and Nord Stream 2 (a 1,234km gas pipeline from Russia to Germany via the Baltic Sea), which was completed last year at a cost of $11bn and awaited only regulatory clearance, would have added as much again. With question marks over immediate Russian supply, and with Nord Stream 2 indefinitely on hold, Europe faces a possible major energy shortage this winter. The EU has proposed a plan to make
T
Europe independent from Russian fossil fuels before 2030. Renewables such as wind and solar will play their part. Germany has rejected nuclear power. Britain, though, has not; and in April this year Prime Minster Boris Johnson announced fast-track planning procedures for a possible seven new nuclear stations.
Whiting in the US is a major supplier of lifting equipment to the nuclear sector. “Lifting and handling in nuclear installations requires a hugely different approach and skillset to regular commercial cranes and manipulators,” says Jeff Negreti, director, Nuclear Projects and Special Cranes at Whiting Corp. “Off-the-shelf solutions are not sufficient;
neither is the standard documentation that cranes are sold with. What keeps me awake at night is paperwork,” he says. “A normal crane might take 12 months from commission to delivery; for a nuclear application that can easily double. Every piece of material, and every process, requires certification, at every stage.”
he Russian invasion of Ukraine has, among other things, concentrated minds on energy supply. Mainland Europe pre-
The term ‘Nuclear crane’ covers a lot.
“A facility will have many different cranes of many different types,” he says. “The reactor room crane will have the largest capacity, of around 150t; that’s because as well as feeding in the fuel rods it has to lift the reactor head, and that is a heavy component. It can be a polar crane, which runs on circular rails laid out at height above the reactor. It is a design almost unique to nuclear facilities thanks to the circular geometry of reactor rooms. The turbine hall crane is similar to fossil-fuel turbine cranes, except in PWR-type reactors where the turbine steam is
radioactive so the crane has to be made accordingly. And you need cask cranes to take the spent fuel out of the reactor and transport it to vehicles to take it to store on-site. “A lot of our business is supplying
crane coverage for plants during refuel outages; every 18 months they perform a fuel change cycle, where they open up the containment vessel. At that point we perform extensive inspection of the crane, which by OSHA rules we have to do before they can even run it. We have at least two people staying on-site day and night just in case they have a problem on the crane,
R SCX has designed and delivered a semi-automatic crane to Dounreay,
www.hoistmagazine.com | May 2022 | 23
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