It's all part of a $691 million upgrade meant to allow the plant to continue operating at least until its present license expires in 2022.
– Edited by Tom Lamar –
According to The Orange County Register, Two, 65-foot, 641-ton steam generators are being hoisted from a ship onto a barge at the Port of Los Angeles this week — one that will carry them to the San Onofre nuclear plant to complete a decade-long replacement process.
And there are more gargantuan feats to come: unloading the giant generators at a dock on the Camp Pendleton Marine base, then carrying them on heavy-duty vehicles at a slow crawl to the nuclear plant.
It's all part of a $691 million upgrade meant to allow the plant to continue operating at least until its present license expires in 2022. It could also allow the plant to last 20 years beyond that if a new license is approved.
"It's pretty exciting for me," said Mike Wharton, Southern California Edison's senior project leader for the steam generator replacement, as he watched two cranes slowly swing the first of the generators onto the barge Tuesday. "By the time this is all done, I will have been working on this with a few other people for about a decade."
The nuclear plant's unit 2 reactor had its steam generators replaced last year. The new generators will be installed in unit 3.
One was being moved from the ship to the barge Tuesday, the second will move Wednesday, Wharton said. The ship carried the generators from their manufacturer in Japan.
The generators will remain at the Port of Los Angeles for a week to 10 days before making their journey south, Wharton said.
After they arrive at Camp Pendleton's Del Mar boat basin, near Oceanside, they'll be loaded onto a tracked vehicle, taken to the Las Pulgas freeway exit, and loaded onto a "Goldhofer" — a long, 256-wheeled vehicle — for a slow crawl of about a mile up Interstate 5.
That will take place late at night to avoid disrupting traffic.
The generators will then be carried along a dirt road and through state parks property to the nuclear plant.
The generators will be installed in October, after the unit 3 reactor has been shut down for refueling.
You can read more here: http://www.ocregister.com/news/-262478–.html
Photos of Steam Generators arriving in port are here: