If you’re a night owl and out and about along the lakeshore over the next couple of weeks you may happen upon a lot of flashing warning lights and some extremely large and very slow moving equipment being transported through St. Joseph thanks to Indiana Michigan Power Company.
Indiana Michigan Power’s Cook Nuclear Plant will transport three 175-ton and three 75-ton retired turbine casings from the plant to a barge on the St. Joseph River. The late-night trips will take place during the last two weeks in August.
An 88-wheeled heavy-haul vehicle, moving about six miles per hour, will travel on Thornton Road, Notre Dame Avenue, Marquette Woods Road, Red Arrow Highway, Lakeshore Drive and across the Blossomland Bridge. The casings will be staged at the LaFarge Terminal before placement on a barge and transport to Tennessee for scrap.
Each of the six moves will have law enforcement escort and require utility crews to move wires and other interferences along the route. Each trip will begin at approximately 11:00pm and take five hours.
The shipments are classified as low-level radioactive waste because there is a minor amount of fixed contamination, barely above background radiation levels, in crevices inside casings. The U.S. Department of Transportation requires radioactive markings on each shipment, but no special precautions will be required of the transport workers or the public during shipment or staging.
Cook Plant spokesman and Communications Manager Bill Schalk of St. Joe tells us, “Over the years, we have moved several over-sized components on similar routes.” Schalk promises, “We will follow all the requirements for a low-level radioactive shipment, but the levels are essentially negligible.”
Replacing the original Unit 2 turbines was a $250 million project that was completed during a refueling outage last fall as part of the plant’s $1.16 billion Life Cycle Management Project. The new turbines increased the unit’s output by almost eight percent. During operation, the turbine casings encompass the rotors and direct the steam through the blades.
The 200-foot long barge will be docked outside the LaFarge Terminal on the St. Joe River for approximately one week while the casings are loaded.
The ten-day trip will take the barge through the locks in Chicago to the Illinois River, then down the Mississippi River and finally to the UniTech facility in Oakridge, Tennessee. Once there, the casings will be decontaminated and the metal recycled.
Just a heads up for you, so you know what’s happening in this late night/early morning forays by the Cook Plant team.
