Million Pound Pick

Recently Mountain Crane service received a call to participate in a very large task… 1,179,600 pounds to be exact!

When Energy Solutions needed to move a pair of decommissioned steam generators from the Crystal River nuclear facility in Florida to their containment in Clive, UT they contracted Mountain Crane Service and Mountain Heavy Transport to engineer and complete the offload from rail, and the move to storage. With each generator weighing in at over a million pounds Mountain Crane and Mountain Heavy had their work cut out for them.

Mountain Crane’s engineers spent months planning the operation, contracting with Slingmax for the largest nylon lift straps ever made by their designers. The straps were built by Elko wire and rope. Each of the 40’ straps weighed in at over 1000 lbs. The amount of energy dissipated by the straps as they stretched was sufficient to sear the sides of the generator as seen in the slideshow.

Utilizing two 700 ton Gantries, Mountain Crane picked the steam generators from rail cars and placed them on Mountain Heavy Transport’s Goldhofer self-propelled modular transports. MHT utilized 20 lines of Goldhofer SPMT for the task.

Mountain Crane Service and Mountain Heavy Transport are proud to have been a part of this milestone project, and we are grateful that Energy Solutions continues to utilize our services.

Mountain Crane Service, Mountain Heavy Transport, and Mountain Wind provide advanced engineering, lift-planning, and O&M crane services throughout the western united states including Utah, Montana, Wyoming, Idaho, Colorado, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas. Our fleet of over 100 cranes, 30 tractor-trailers, and 20 Goldhofer hydraulic platform trailers can be mobilized anywhere in the Western U.S.