Pump Truck with Long Boom Headed to Fukushima Nuclear Power Plant
March 24th, 2011…usually used for concrete pouring…
Via: Xinhua:
A Chinese-made pump truck with a long boom will leave Shanghai for Japan Tuesday after the owner of the troubled Fukushima Dai-Ichi nuclear power plant requested it, according the vehicle’s manufacturer.
The vehicle with a 62-meter boom is scheduled to be shipped Tuesday morning. It is expected to arrive at the port of Osaka, Japan on Wednesday or Thursday.
The vehicle was manufactured by Sany Heavy Industry Co., Ltd. based in Changsha, capital city of central China’s Hunan Province, for a customer in Saudi Arabia.
On March 19, the Tokyo Electric Power Co. (TEPCO), which owns the Fukushima power plant, asked the Chinese embassy in Japan and Sany for the pump truck.
With the Saudi Arabian customer’s agreement, Sany decided to provide the pump truck to TEPCO free of charge. The vehicle, usually used for concrete pouring, is valued at 1 million U.S. dollars.
Sany Heavy Industry is a world leading heavy equipment manufacturer.
i don’t know what they are going to do with this peice of equipment, but i have seen on tv shots of what they have been doing with smaller versions of this over the last few days.
three of the reactor units have no outer building roof and their spent fuel assemby pools were boiling dry, so after the heli bs and lots of fire equipment spraying water from ground level, they got in one or two trucks with booms to pour water from above. one of these trucks was loaned from a major construction contractor and it is usually used for pouring wet concrete.
but, this latest Chinese one, we shall have to wait and see, i suppose.
Yes, it seemed to me that they already had the ability to boom water into the reactors. Maybe this is just for water… or, maybe not.
I suppose that it could also be used for the boron slurry:
Pouring water laced with boron into a pool would help stop such a reaction, as boron absorbs neutrons which are emitted during a nuclear reaction. Japan on Thursday announced plans to import 150 tons of boron from South Korea and France to replenish its stocks.
http://www.csmonitor.com/USA/2011/0318/Japan-nuclear-crisis-Is-massive-water-dump-making-any-difference/%28page%29/2
At some point the criminal minds running TEPCO will realize their other assets are in jeopardy of being permanently shut down if they all too much radiation out. The current amount can be propaganda’d away.
And hopefully greed will force the sealing of these reactors. Throw a bunch of boric acid on it and bury it in concrete. The Japanese Gov’t has already guaranteed partial restitution for the property destruction the radiation will cause.
http://af.reuters.com/article/energyOilNews/idAFL3E7EN3DN20110323
boron slurry…
yes, i am hopeful that this is the purpose.
after the announcement yesterday about the water, all the shops sold out of bottled water in about an hour. they had begun to stock water with purchase limits up to that point.
units 1 to 4 are unsalvagable anyway.
but there is a very large amount of spent fuel stored there (as well as some serriously “hot” rods in the reactors and in the storage pools during regular maintenance). this is not the Ukraine SSR. i really doubt the sand-and-cement trick is going to satisfy many people here…
Good luck to all you folks, Tochigi.
In truth, I’ve been expecting the ‘burial option’ since about the third day into this crisis. It’s likely the Japanese nuclear industry has a fantastic opportunity here — a perfect excuse to just lump ALL their spent rods from every reactor in the country into one big pile and bury them in the sand. It would save them the ongoing expenses and liabilities of having to baby-sit these existing rods forever and ever, and give them a kind of fresh slate going forward…while the environmentalists couldn’t really do anything to stop them because it’s “an emergency” after all.
If I was in a position of authority there I’d certainly have put the idea on the table for discussion — irregardless of whether the current meltdowns was under control or not.
i agree with you lagavulin that cynical behaviour knows no bounds in the nuclear industry. but how would the burial option work in terms of preventing tens of thousands of years of seawater and groundwater contamination from the “buried” treasure? a commenter at TheOilDrum (i think) mentioned very widespread and ongoing contamination of groundwater from Chernobyl. and this is “by the seaside” so quite a different scenario imho.
tochigi,
I’m not saying there wouldn’t be serious problems long into the future…what I’m saying is that if they have to bury the rods anyway, perhaps it would benefit them to bury EVERYTHING they have. And (cynically) even if they don’t necessarily have to bury the rods, they may still be considering the opportunity to be had by burying everything they have anyway.
I’m just sayin’…
Just found this free online documentary on the extremely-long-term storage problems of spent rods. Haven’t watched it yet… (great free documentary site BTW):
http://topdocumentaryfilms.com/into-eternity/?utm_source=feedburner&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Feed%3A+TopDocumentaryFilms+%28Top+Documentary+Films+-+Watch+Free+Documentaries+Online%29&utm_content=Yahoo!+Mail