FAR EAST Ӏ REGIONAL REPORT
Cop-ouT?
In light of the recent UN climate change conference, Cranes Today contributor Stuart Anderson looks at the historical relationship between cranes and energy production as a backdrop to the current situation in China, India, and SE Asia.
Over the course of these past weeks and months the global media and international politics have had a razor focus on COP 26 and the critical issue of climate change. Reports of the countless hundreds of powerful and well- meaning speeches and who- knows how many lofty promises have dulled the attention of even the most ardently concerned. Needless to say, this is an issue of critical importance to the entire planet but, sadly, one often discussed in terms disconnected from the daily lives of citizens and activities of businesses. For over fifty years, power generation and usage in their various forms have been issues in which the crane industry has been heavily involved. Starting in the early 1960s with the first lattice boom cranes of 100-tons capacity, as crane capacity quickly escalated, customer and project demands for lifting ever-heavier pieces to ever-greater heights similarly escalated. And, over those years, since the very first ‘Cranes’ magazine back in 1966, barely an issue has been printed without a mention of the involvement of cranes in power generation and distribution. Indeed, that year we reported on the re-lining of a blast furnace operated by a leading tin- plate manufacturer in Ebbw Vale, South Wales. A rented British- built Babcock-Weitz 280B saddle jib tower crane safely removed
28 CRANES TODAY In December
2010, Hitachi ordered the largest Transi-Lift to date, the 3,000-ton capacity LTL-3000
and replaced a 10t bell unit 43m (140ft) above ground level in just 3½ minutes - against the contractors estimated time of 2½ hours!
In late 1984 at the invitation
of the UK’s Central Electricity Generation Board, Cranes Today visited the 4000 mw Drax power plant as it neared completion in north Yorkshire. As Europe’s largest power plant, we reported (apparently with some pride) that it would ‘consume 37 trainloads of coal every day’! Large numbers of mobile cranes – mainly Coles, Ruston-Bucyrus, Priestman and NCK - were in evidence but, of course, in those days most mobile cranes were of quite modest lifting capacity and reach. Given the long booms and jibs needed for reach on such projects, contractors and architects planned jobs around relatively light loads - often meaning hundreds of lifts at wide radius and many months on the job site. In fact, work on Drax had started some 18-years earlier in 1966! Perhaps non-surprisingly given the contractor’s use of two very-old tower cranes made in Glasgow by Sir William Arrol whose gantry crane had built the RMS ‘Titanic’ for Harland & Wolff.
BIG CRAWLERS TRANSFORMED POWER PLANT CONSTRUCTION By the time of our visit to Drax, Mannesmann-Demag had already supplied a fully-hydraulic
1,200-tonne capacity CC 2000 RL (Ring Lift) for nuclear power plant construction in Bulgaria. In fact Demag had designed and built this - by-far its largest crawler crane - just eight years after developing their first fully hydraulic crawler crane – the 80-tonne capacity CC280 – quite a jump! The CC 2000RL was rated 350t @ 50m radius for the construction of a nuclear power plant project in Bulgaria. The contrast with the cranes being used at Drax could not have been more stark! Similarly the approach adopted
by Hitachi in Japan was also years ahead of UK practice. Japan’s first commercial nuclear power reactor began operating in mid-1966 - ten years after the UK’s Windscale nuclear accident. In September 1981, Bechtel, acting on behalf of Hitachi, approached the Neil F. Lampson Company in Kennewick, Washington State regarding their Transi-Lift heavy crawler cranes. In October 1983, on behalf of Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), Hitachi began work on the 11,000mw Kariwa nuclear power plant 20km from Niigata. After extensive negotiations between Hitachi and Lampson a crane specification decision was reached - defining the use of a 103m main boom, 36.6m jib and max capacity of 840t @ 30m radius. The crane arrived on site in May 1985. By the time Cranes Today
arrived on site in Japan in late f
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