Sellafield sludge retrieval gets successful mammoth lift 28 November 2012

One of the most technically challenging crane lifts ever performed on the Sellafield site passed off without problems recently.

"We had to lift a 50te pipe-bridge into place to link a 60-year-old legacy pond with a new sludge storage facility," explains project manager Steve Harnwell.

"The job involved convincing ourselves, the safety experts and our safety regulators that we could safely build one of the world's largest mobile cranes in the heart of the Sellafield site," he continues.

"Just finding enough space between the buildings was a challenge, never mind lifting the pipe-bridge over the top of neighbouring nuclear facilities."

Harnwell describes the achievement as "a mammoth task, carried out with an enormous crane, which had to be executed with surgical precision".

The team went to extraordinary lengths to ensure safety, all the way from executing a dummy run off-site to check that the lifting operation could physically be done.

The 30 metre pipe=bridge will be used to transfer radioactive sludge from the first generation Magnox storage pond (FGMSP) to the new sludge packaging plant (SPP1) for interim storage.

The FGMSP is one of the priority decommissioning projects at Sellafield: legacy sludge has to be retrieved from the pond floor to allow the pond to be emptied of nuclear fuel and the facility decommissioned.

Installation of the pipe-bridge will not only allow retrieval to commence in 2014 but will also provide a back-up emergency route for the FGMSP pond, prior to it being emptied.

Ground preparations for the crane required 40m3 of concrete foundations to be poured to provide a stable base for the lifting operations. The 1200te crane travelled to site on a number of wagons. A second 100te crane was used to prepare the site and build the larger crane.

"The crane lift shows what good work can be achieved by challenging norms and expectations," comments Mark Steele, head of programme, Sellafield, for the NDA.

"Assembling the pipe-bridge off site and putting arrangements for the crane lift in place has saved significant work on site and allowed the task to be completed some 18 months earlier than scheduled."

Brian Tinham

Related Companies
Sellafield Ltd

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