Giant pump headed to Japan: 80-ton device to be hauled from Lowcountry to Atlanta

Only three truck-mounted pumps in the world rise high enough to hose water on the overheating, radioactive reactors in Japan. One of them, it turns out, was in Summerville.

That's why sometime this week a tractor-trailer rig with 10 axles will lumber its way down Interstate 26 hauling more than 80 tons of a device that looks like a huge, folded-up steel girder. The truck is bound for Atlanta, where it will be loaded on the largest cargo plane in the world, scheduled to be flown out Saturday.

It's not the first rescue work for this pump. The devices are built to pour concrete, and this one was bought by a Georgia company to pour concrete for casks at the mixed oxide fuel plant at the Savannah River Site in Barnwell. A shorter version of the pump by the same manufacturer poured concrete for the towers of the Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge.

The pump extends to a length more than two-thirds of a football field, but can be folded up to about the length of most tractor-trailers. The problem is the weight. At 170,000 pounds, the rig is double the weight allowed over the road without special permits, said Pat Barber of Superior Transportation in North Charleston.

It's so heavy that when Ashmore Concrete Contractors bought it for the Barnwell work, the state of Georgia wouldn't permit it. So it had to be disassembled for shipment from Germany to America, and brought to Superior Transportation to be reassembled.

This time, Georgia granted a special permit for the critical shipment.

It was at an Ashmore Concrete office in Summerville before it was moved to Superior Transportation to be retro-fitted for the work.

The 200-plus-foot length is staggering. In the Superior yard on Friday, it craned out from the truck like a dinosaur's arm. Behind it, a fleet of 70-foot cranes look like Tonka Toys. And not all its sections were extended, said Alan Woods of Putzmeister Inc., the company that builds the pumps.

This thing is so big that it couldn't be built in the company's Wisconsin plant.

"Simply, our facility isn't large enough," said Kelly Blickle, marketing services manager in Wisconsin.

The pump is one of two that will be flown to Japan aboard Russian-made Antonov AN-225 Mriya Super Heavy Transport planes, the world's largest aircraft.

The other pump is in California. The planes were designed to transport the Russian Space Shuttle, Blickle said. The rigs are being moved to pump water, but if a decision is made to encase a reactor in concrete -- similar to a method used in the 1986 Chernobyl disaster -- they could do that, too, she said.

A spokesman for Tokyo Electric Power Co., which runs the troubled plant, said he did not have any information on pumps coming from the United States.

The situation in Japan is different than in Chernobyl, said Edward Morse, a professor of nuclear engineering at the University of California, Berkeley.

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The devastation in Japan

"This is not a Hail Mary Chernobyl where they're going to start slopping concrete all over everything," Morse said. Rather, Morse thinks a likely scenario at some point would involve constructing a building to surround the structure, complete with a roof. However, instead of completely sealing or entombing the plant, Morse believes the structure still will allow some access to the site so that workers can get back in if necessary.

As concrete contracting goes, this work is at a premium. Moving the 80-ton thing alone isn't cheap. Barber said his trucks hauling about that weight go only 2 to 3 miles per hour.

"If you've got to ask, you don't have the money to do it," Woods said with a rueful grin.

The Associated Press contributed to thisreport. Reach Bo Petersen at 937-5744.