Perkins Specialized Transportation Continues Its Cross-Country Trek

Editor's note: This is a followup to a story about Northfield-based Perkins Specialized Transportation building a specially built hydraulic platform trailer to move low-level hazardous waste. This story comes courtesy of our sister site, San Clemente Patch.

Northfield's is in the midst of job of epic proportions that Northfield Patch first reported about in June.

Contractors at the San Onofre (CA) Nuclear Generating Station are preparing to haul a lightly contaminated 750,000-pound piece of the plant's old steam generator to a waste site in Utah—and Perkins is right in the middle of the action.

Because there is no off-the-shelf truck or transport vehicle powerful enough to haul the generator piece to Utah, contractors are building a specialty carriage on old Route 101, a half mile south of the plant, said plant spokesman Gil Alexander.

The generator piece is painted with a thick coat of blue to prevent pieces of steel from chipping or flaking off.

Three semi-trucks will haul the carriage—one in front and two in the back—at 15 mph. The journey to the dump site in Utah is expected to take three weeks.

Helping with the move is Perkins' hydraulic platform trailer built in Northfield, measuring 399 feet long, 20 feet wide and weighing in at 1.4 million pounds.

It took Perkins two and a half years to build the potentially record-breaking vehicle. The challenge is potentially record-breaking because the load of low-level hazardous steam generators' weight and distance to be moved—about 900 miles.

“As far as we know, it’s the largest load ever moved this amount of distance in the US,” said Justin Brevik, equipment services manager at Perkins.

Fortunately, with 192 tires and 48 axles, the Perkins trailer is up to the task.

The generate, a thick, tubular piece—twice as tall as a man—contains hundreds of tiny pipes through which radioactive steam from the reactor core circulated in a sealed loop. Nonradioactive water inside would hit the white-hot coils and instantly turn into steam, which was collected in the other, bulbous half of the steam generator, said Alexander.

Workers sliced off the bulbous piece to be used as scrap metal; it was never touched by radioactive water.

The radiation levels on the generator piece are 5 to 6 millirems, Alexander said. For perspective, if you were to stand 6 feet from the piece for one hour, you would receive as much radiation as if you had a dental X-ray, Alexander said.

The U.S. Department of Transportation allows materials emitting up to 10 millirems on the country’s highways.

After the generator piece is deposited, Alexander said, the carriage will be disassembled and carried back to San Onofre on flatbed trucks, where it will be reassembled for the second of .

Alexander said the generator piece will head out within a couple of weeks. The date and exact route will not be publicized, but he confirmed that the piece will not travel through Orange County.

The generator pieces are left from the

Alexander said all four new steam generators are working well.

Once Perkins' trailer has transported all four loads of generators, it will be disassembled and return to Northfield, where it will be stored until its strength and size are required for future hauls.