Now that's an Oversize Load

Moving part of an old nuke plant to a disposal site. Simply massive.

Heavy Hauler

Good grief that's crazy

What I'm most impressed by is the fact that those trailer axles turn to help navigate corners in the road had you not mentioned that this is part of a nuclear plant I'd of guessed it to be a giant pig castrator ha ha sorry I had to before someone else did.
Allan

Meh,
My Tacoma could pull that.

ok I will hold your beer lets see.

Definitely! Might struggle stopping

Geez, how many tires are on the ground there?

I would hate to have to tires for that rig.

460

How far does it get towed?

The entire trip was 450 miles, not sure how far was on rail.

Took 7 weeks.

How many tires are on each axle?

I think 460 includes all 45 trailer axles and the 8 trucks powering the rig.

And still get 20 miles to the gallon

Dang. Any idea how much that thing weighs?

770 TONS or 1.54 million pounds.

With a cracked manifold and no converter.

That's the reactor vessel from Unit 1 of the San Onofre nuclear power plant located on Camp Pendelton near San Clemente Ca. It was transported from the plant site to the Energy Solutions disposal site in Clive Utah. The 770 ton load was transported via rail to southern Nevada then by roadway into Utah.

Peanuts compared to what they will be moving out of there in the future. I never worked Unit one there. By the time I started doing nukes, it was long closed down and in the process of being dismantled. That thing they are moving is the core. It will probably be pretty radioactive for the next couple hundred years. It's not fuel so Its not as bad. Anyway, that is a pretty small core. The other two reactors I worked at (Unit's 2 &3) are much larger. It will probably be decades before they are ready to be moved though. I'm sure they are probably still in the process of dry casking the spent fuel at those two plants. I don't know how they will move the other two cores but I would doubt it could be done with any truck.

I saw a large truck like that moving something out of the shipyard in Vallejo CA in the early 2000's. It wasn't that big but it had a lotta axles and wheels. The guy must have misjudges a turn and tried to back up a bit. When I saw him he had gone over a curve and blown about twelve tires out and mangled several rims. Felt sorry for the guy.

That's impressive. I was snapping pics when Chapman's trencher left our job. I only counted 72 tires on it.

The "core" is the fuel and was removed from the reactor vessel. This is the reactor vessel itself. I don't know if the internals, upper and lower, are included in the package that was shipped or not. It would make sense to me to have left the lowers in place and to have put the uppers back in place after the fuel assemblies and control rod assemblies were removed (which both were).

We had one of those superloads come through here last year. This was a tissue paper dryer. Some of the hills they went up and down were amazing.

Man that's cool right there

"On the Road Again" Three Mile Island coming down your street.

I see they are all duals so you got about 80 tires plus all the front ones!

B ryce

I’m surprised that they dont have a to dismantle it further so its not so heavy? Since it was said they maybe radioactive, a torch probably isn’t a good idea.

I read that the reactor vessels from units 2 and 3 are going to be cut up and shipped as smaller loads, but this one was not.

30 years ago I was working for a grain elevator and they used our section of train tracks to move a big electrical transformer. It came in on a flat car and was transferred by two giant cranes to a flat bed semi truck. The truck looked a lot like the one in the photo with, maybe, 20 axles. The axles would steer as the truck went around bends. The truck had a state police escort and left us at 5mph on a 15 mile trip to the local nuclear plant.

The transformer was the biggest I've ever seen and took up most of 2 lanes but the weight was a bigger issue. I don't know what it weighed.

I guess all those tires must spread the weight out significantly because 770 tons seems like a lot more than you’d want to put on a normal highway.

That's exactly what its designed to do - spread the weight out.