The near-meltdown of four nuclear reactors in Japan is putting some huge pumps to a test that’s even trickier than what happened at Chernobyl. That’s according to global Germany-based firm Putzmeister, which is supplying the machinery to cool down and eventually help encase in cement the broken power plants. Putzmeister (that’s literally “Plaster Master” in German) should know, because they were on the scene at the Russian disaster twenty-five years ago. The company, which makes giant, bright-red truck-mounted cranes with arms up to 230 feet in length, supplied eleven vehicles to the Soviet plant after the explosion and fire at the nuclear reactor which released record deadly radioactive contamination into the atmosphere in 1986.

"In Chernobyl, where a single reactor was encased, eleven trucks were in action for a number of months. In Fukushima we're talking about four reactors," Gerald Karch, managing director for Putzmeister, said in an interview with Reuters. That’s four times as many reactors as Chernobyl, and they all have to be cooled down before any concrete casing construction can begin. In the Soviet Union, the plant was cooled down before Putzmeister arrived, making it a simpler maneuver. Although no final decision has been made by the company involved, likely it will be the same process, but times four.

"In my opinion, when a closed-circuit cooling system has been developed and successfully set up, there will be no other option but to encase the reactors in concrete," Karch said. "There are certain similarities between the two events, but at the same time I think that we can't really draw comparisons," Karch said, indicating that the plants could as yet possibly be stabilized if all went well in the coming weeks and months.

Putzmeister has sold five vehicles, also used in firefighting, to Tokyo Electric Power Co (TEPCO), the operator of the Fukushima Daiichi power plant, at the cost of "well over a million dollars" each. "The transportation costs alone -- in an Antonov aircraft -- of a Putzmeister machine from Germany to Japan, are close to a million dollars," revealed Karch.

The trucks themselves, usually only built on commission, were delivered on extremely short notice after the earthquake, thanks to other customers willing to give up their vehicles in the emergency.

"We quickly located a truck that was on its way to a customer in Vietnam. By March 18, we had been able to transport that truck to Fukushima, where we trained members of TEPCO to operate it," Karch said.

Among the four other trucks, some had earlier been in Spain, but returned largely unused, when scheduled projects were ended or delayed during the recession.

Currently in use at the reactor in Fukushima is the Putzmeister M58-5 truck-mounted concrete pump (produced in Aichtal near Stuttgart) that has a vertical reach of 190 feet and a 5-arm boom to douse the damaged cooling pools. Their advantage is that water can be fed a great distance over the destroyed buildings and can be delivered to exactly where it is required.

The pump has an output of (210 yd³/hr) 160 m³/h at a pressure of 1233 psi (85 bar), about three to four times the volume of the average emergency industrial fire pumper truck. It is driven by the truck's diesel engine, so it does not rely on any external power supply. Operated by remote control, the distributor arm has maximum flexible movement while allowing human operators to avoid radiation exposure close in.

http://www.putzmeisteramerica.com/