No room for error
August 1st 2009 Konecranes national distributor, Cooper Specialised Handling, is helping in the safe
decomissioning of a nuclear power station with a custom-built reachstacker
The Konecranes reachstacker supplied
by Cooper SH will handle 45 tonne
concrete overpacks containing
Intermediate Level Nuclear Waste (ILW) for
Magnox North at its Trawsfynydd Site. The
truck will move the ILW into a purpose-built
store which will contain the waste until a
national repository has become available.
Cooper SH designed a special attachment
to handle the specially built 2.5 metre square
concrete overpacks encasing a heavy duty
stainless steel box in which the waste is
transported. Critical factors to the safe
application include the control of the vertical
lift the distance of the driver from the box of
ILW and a number of bespoke recovery
procedures.
Doug Barber, ILW Store Project Lead at
Trawsfynydd Site "The UK nuclear industry is
one of the toughest industrial regimes in the
world," says Doug Barber, ILW Store Project
Lead at Trawsfynydd Site. "We needed
absolute control of the vertical lift, a
machine that could perform accurately
under extremely slow conditions as well as a
facility for total manual override."
Magnox North personnel were involved
throughout the design, manufacturing and
testing process that saw numerous visits to
the Konecranes production facility in
Markaryd, Sweden. This was an essential
pre-requisite of the supply contract to adhere
to the strict quality demands of the nuclear
industry.
The specially designed attachment has
elongated twist locks which produce a
synchronised arc and extension as the boom
moves in, ensuring a permanent vertical lift.
The Konecranes machine has also been
programmed with different logic and load
curve characteristics to handle the waste
load versus the lighter stillage utilised for
handling drums, thereby ensuring each load
is handled with the same care and attention.
The 45 tonne Konecranes truck will move
a total of 250 boxes of ILW into storage over
the five years of its operational life, working
for a total of 25 hours. Cooper's contract
includes full contract hire and all-inclusive
service and maintenance and the total
contract equates to a cost in excess of
£16,000 per hour More articles from Cooper Specialised Handling Ltd.: | 
