Drudge is running
this as the evening's headline:
[blockquote]The world’s largest concrete pump, deployed at the construction site of the U.S. government’s $4.86 billion mixed oxide fuel plant at Savannah River Site, is being moved to Japan in a series of emergency measures to help stabilize the Fukushima reactors.
“The bottom line is, the Japanese need this particular unit worse than we do, so we’re giving it up,” said Jerry Ashmore, whose company, Augusta-based Ashmore Concrete Contractors, Inc., is the concrete supplier for the MOX facility.
The 190,000-pound pump, made by Germany-based Putzmeister has a 70-meter boom and can be controlled remotely, making it suitable for use in the unpredictable and highly radioactive environment of the doomed nuclear reactors in Japan, he said.
“There are only three of these pumps in the world, of which two are suited for this work, so we have to get it there as soon as we can,” Ashmore said in an interview with The Chronicle today. “Time is very much a factor.”
The pump was moved Wednesday from the construction site in Aiken County to a facility in Hanahan, S.C., for minor modifications, and will be trucked to Atlanta’s Hartsfield Airport, where it will be picked up by the world’s largest cargo plane, the Russian-made Antonov 225, which will fly it to Tokyo.
Ashmore officials have already notified Shaw AREVA MOX Services, which is building the MOX plant for the U.S. Department of Energy’s National Nuclear Security Administration, that the pump was being moved and will not be returned. “It will be too hot to come back,” Ashmore said.
The costs of the operation, including an estimated $1.4 million to fly the pump from Atlanta to Tokyo aboard the Antonov transporter, are being underwritten by the Tokyo Electric Power Company through a contracting agreement with Putzmeister.
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