FAR EAST Ӏ REGIONAL REPORT


j 1985 the Transi-Lift had already completed some 40 lifts over a period of some five months. Thanks to Hitachi’s modular design of the reactor, the number of lifts had been reduced by 11 to just 17 with the largest of these being 305t. Ahead for the crane in November 1987 lay the installation of an 8.4m long, 735-tonne reactor at 55m radius. The job demanded the use of a 103m boom with the load being lifted 47.5m and lowered through an opening of just 9m with a clearance at either side of only 300mm. More recently, in December


2010, Hitachi ordered the largest Transi-Lift to date, the 3,000-ton capacity LTL-3000 for work on the Kashiwazaki-Kariwa nuclear plant. Soon afterwards, the tragic 2011 Fukushima earthquake and tsunami disaster caused enormous disruptions including long and on-going delays to the delivery of the Lampson crane now owned by Hitachi. Most recently, in July 2021 TEPCO stated that the plant would not be re-started until fiscal 2022 at the earliest. Meanwhile, as a consequence of the cost of decommissioning the Fukushima- Daiichi plant TEPCO’s very future seems in doubt. Meanwhile TEPCO has outlined plans to invest up to Y3,000 billion ($27 billion) by fiscal 2030 for decarbonization efforts and Hitachi’s LTL 3000 remains in Washington State, being regularly inspected and function tested. For decades during the


1960s-1970s the market for large-size crawler cranes had been dominated by Manitowoc and American Hoist. Indeed Manitowoc’s ‘Ringer’ and American’s ‘Sky Horse’ had been break-through developments allowing heavier lifting capacities than previously possible. However, although very strong and reliable these heavy, mechanical cranes were relatively difficult to erect,


30 CRANES TODAY


The Transilift LTL 2600B owned by Hitachi and on site at a nuclear power project in Japan


transport and operate. And the world was changing. In 1982-3, another totally new crane was designed expressly by Liebherr Werk Ehingen to meet the needs on Ontario Hydro (See our Cranes Today interview with former Liebherr chief engineer Hans-Dieter Willim in May 2019 ‘Designing the crane industry’). At the time the largest crawler crane ever built, the LR 1600 was designed to handle 356t heat exchangers at 46m height at the Darlington Nuclear plant. Things were also changing on the other side of the world - since its August 1984 introduction, Kobelco had shipped fifteen of its 450-tonne capacity 7450 crawler cranes mainly for steam and nuclear power plants in Japan. Clearly, the writing had long been on the wall. The days of the mechanical crane were over. Regrettably, those companies so heavily-vested in the design, manufacture and sale of those wonderful old cranes were not reading the writing on the wall. Disposing of nuclear waste has


long been a major preoccupation of the US Dept of Energy – specifically focussed on the former nuclear power facility at Hanford in Washington State where a 1,000-ton Transilift had been employed in 1979. Over a period of several recent years, with the significant support of Bechtel, a large vitrification plant has been constructed to convert the dangerous radioactive waste to stable gas. It has been operating successfully and with exemplary levels of safety these recent years. These operations are supported by a fleet of Genie and JLG aerial work platforms working alongside some 33 cranes ranging from small Grove, Link-Belt and Terex telescopics, Link-belt lattice cranes, a 650-tonne Demag with luffing boom and several tower cranes including three 50-tonne capacity Potain MD 1400s working to 73m (240ft) height. The spiralling cost of decommissioning nuclear plants and disposing of the nuclear waste is a political ‘hot potato’ in many ‘pioneering’ nuclear power f


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