900 Ton Containment Vessel Bottom Head Installed At Vogtle 3

Yesterday, Georgia Power announced that they successfully lifted the first part of the Vogtle Unit 3 containment vessel into place. From World Nuclear News: "The component — measuring almost 40 meters wide, 12 meters tall and weighing over 900 tons — was assembled on-site from pre-fabricated steel plates. The cradle for the containment vessel was put in place on the unit's nuclear island in April. The completed bottom head was raised by a heavy lift derrick and placed on the cradle on 1 June, Georgia Power announced." Georgia Power has a pretty cool gallery of high resolution construction photos (the bottom head is the background on my XBMC machine). Below the fold there is a video of the crane moving the bottom head into place.

Comments

Re:What? Where?

[malakai]

The key points missing from this summary is that this is the first Generation III+ reactor being built in the US. The only reason it was allowed to be built was it's an existing site, and had already planned reactor 3 and 4. There's still a general no build moratorium on new reactor sites in the US.

This is the AP1000 which is sort of the "So you want to run a nuclear reactor, For Dummies" type of reactor.

They are very difficult to break. Even if operators do nothing, the reactor will go through a set of procedures ( at times with explosive bolts) to disable the reaction and cool for 72 hours. After that, a helicopter will need to drop water on the top of the tank to keep the gravity well fed.

See more info here on wiki .