NuCrane, a joint venture between Westinghouse Electric Company subsidiary PaR Nuclear of Shoreview, Minnesota, and Hutchinson Manufacturing, (HMI) – was formed in September 2009 to manufacture cranes primarily for the US market.
This new production capacity complements PaR Nuclear’s provision of fuel-handling equipment and outage-critical cranes for commercial nuclear power plants worldwide.
One month after the joint venture was unveiled, NuCrane Manufacturing broke ground on a 51,000sqft, 56ft high factory near HMI’s existing site in Hutchinson, Minnesota, US. Now, the facility is operational and NuCrane employees are manufacturing cranes that weigh as much as 1.3 million pounds and measure as high as 43ft.
NuCrane Manufacturing’s initial project is the manufacture of a polar crane and cask-handling crane for China National Nuclear Corporation’s (CNNC) Sanmen 1 Nuclear Power Plant currently under construction in Sanmen County, Zhejiang Province in China.
Production of these cranes is on schedule and the cranes will be shipped from Minnesota to China in mid-2011. Sanmen 1 is scheduled to be operational in 2013. Crane production for the first new nuclear power plant in the US, Southern Nuclear’s Vogtle 3, is projected to start in 2011.
