NuCrane Manufacturing Now Fabricating Cranes for Nuclear Plants

PITTSBURGH, June 23 /PRNewswire/ -- NuCrane Manufacturing LLC (NuCrane) has begun fabricating, assembling and testing specialty cranes for nuclear power plants, including the Westinghouse-designed AP1000™ plants under construction in China and those planned for future construction in the U.S.

NuCrane – a joint venture between Westinghouse Electric Company subsidiary PaR Nuclear, Inc. of Shoreview, Minn., and Hutchinson Manufacturing, Inc., (HMI) of Hutchinson, Minn. – was formed in September 2009 to manufacture large cranes primarily for the U.S. 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 announced, NuCrane Manufacturing broke ground on a 51,000-square-foot, 56-foot-high factory near HMI's existing site in Hutchinson, Minn., U.S.  Today the facility is operational and NuCrane employees are manufacturing cranes that weigh as much as 1.3 million pounds and measure as high as 43 feet.

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 U.S., Southern Nuclear Company's Vogtle 3, is projected to start in 2011.

Westinghouse Electric Company, a group company of Toshiba Corporation (TKY: 6502), is the world's pioneering nuclear energy company and is a leading supplier of nuclear plant products and technologies to utilities throughout the world.  Westinghouse supplied the world's first PWR in 1957 in Shippingport, Pa.  Today, Westinghouse technology is the basis for approximately one-half of the world's operating nuclear plants, including 60 percent of those in the United States.

SOURCE NuCrane Manufacturing LLC