POWER | APPLICATION REPORT
because an outage costs them over a million dollars a day and they don’t want to extend it for a crane issue.” Decommissioning a nuclear plant is as
crane-consuming as commissioning it. Fred Waugh is Whiting’s decommissioning specialist. “It takes 10 years to decommission a site from start to finish,” he says. “Much of the work is done using the facility’s own cranes, and we have to keep those in safe condition. Currently the US is decommissioning Yankee in Vermont, Three Mile Island in Pennsylvania, Indian Point in New York, Diablo Canyon in California; a lot of older plants from the 1970s will not be getting their licences renewed, so that will provide work for us.” SCX of Sheffield is a UK specialist in
nuclear lifting. Its first nuclear project was the decommissioning of Berkeley power station in 1997. Currently it is working on the decommissioning of Dounreay in northern Scotland. One major project there is a facility to store intermediate level waste, packaged into cement and steel drums, which are then placed in long-term storage. SCX has designed and delivered a semi-
automatic crane to handle the 500-litre drums. It moves them to their correct locations and sets them down in their correct positions in the store. It is a Street ZX84 hoist, with 40m long-
travel and 12.2m cross-travel, which gives it access to all areas of the drum store. Lift speed is 6.0 to 0.6 m/min and cross and long travel is at 15 to 1.5 m/min. Lift height is 10.4m. A four-wire rope fall and
R SCX is currently working on decommissioning Dounreay, in Scotland.
true vertical lift give the required pinpoint positioning, and the hoist has been de- rated for additional safety. An integrally connected drum management system knows where any asset is at any time, with data fed to a desk in the control room. Safety and redundancy of course are paramount: the crane includes CCTV and remote recovery in case of primary mechanical or electrical failure. It has a MotoSuiveur hoist safety system, with supplemental independent winches for mechanical recovery. Its design working life of 100 years is supported by calculations, documentation and comprehensive acceptance testing. The crane is sacrificial, to be left in the drum store once its job is complete. At the same time as announcing his
nuclear plans, Boris Johnson urged the creation of gigawatts of floating wind farms to secure future energy – and wind power has indeed been the big energy success story of recent years. Wind generators sit on top of tall towers. Getting materials up to them needs hoists, and with the growth of wind farms specialised hoists have appeared to satisfy that need.
High speeds and long lifts are the
requirement, as is the ability to work instantly on demand after months or years idle - frequent maintenance trips to the top of a 100-metre tower being something one would want to avoid. So for example the gearbox and slipping
clutch of the Demag DC-Wind chain hoist are designed to be maintenance-free for up to 10 years. It can lift loads of up to 1,500kg with hook paths up to 180 metres.
Q SCX Magnox drum lifters in testing and operation mode.
24 | May 2022 |
www.hoistmagazine.com Dana Inc. of Ohio makes power- and
energy-management systems for vehicles as its core business but has diversified into nacelle cranes. “The growing need to service equipment on wind farms has brought about the need for them,” says Jared Bryan, senior manager, Corporate Communications. “They have been deployed in multiple wind farms in Northern Europe, China, and the U.S. “Our hoisting winches are fitted within the nacelle of the turbine. The winch allows maintenance staff to lift and lower the turbine safely for repair or replacement activities. We also offer specially designed winches for lifting personnel or a maintenance platform. “The design we provide is for offshore wind nacelles rather than on-shore,” he says. “They are hydraulic hoisting winches with integrated fixed-displacement axial piston motors. They come with an integrated torque sensor, an encoder, a top roller and counterweight, and a spooling device for 150-170m of steel rope. The personnel lifting application and the high rope capacity are particularly key in this application. So too is great starting responsiveness. And our nacelle cranes give a smooth ride even at low speeds, which again is important both for personnel-carrying and for cargo.” The US installed 17GW of wind energy in 2020 [source: DIE report, 2021] to bring total capacity to 122GW. But the vast majority of that is from on-shore farms. It has up until now lagged well behind Europe and the Far East in offshore wind installation. Only two offshore wind projects currently operate off America’s shores, and both are small: a 30-megawatt wind farm near Block Island, Rhode Island and a 12-megawatt pilot project in coastal Virginia.
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