But the big crane, which has lifted domes, containment rings and reactor components into the construction site, is not the only one on the project. Elsewhere at Hinkley Point C, a second crane – albeit without a distinctive name – has been solving different problems, such as how to make the congested construction less crowded. The team behind it claims it shows a better way to build massive bits of infrastructure like this in future.
The crane – Marr Contracting’s M2480D – was installed in the Unit 2 turbine hall. The heavy-lift luffing tower crane was first considered for the nuclear power plant site in 2023, when Steve Ryder, general manager at Marr Contracting, was approached by a colleague at EDF, which oversees the project. EDF had battled to get Unit 1 of the project completed and its turbine hall built because of overcrowding from a panoply of cranes, each of which had their own footprint on the site, around which machinery had to navigate. “Instead of the crane facilitating the construction, essentially it can hinder the construction by taking up all the space,” Ryder says.
So EDF had a question: did Marr have any alternative methods for the second crack of the whip?
The company did: a single crane, positioned in the middle of the building, replacing multiple crawler cranes and with specifications capable of handling anything that needed lifting throughout the project. Marr claims it is the highest-capacity luffing tower crane in the world, with a 330-tonne standard lift capacity at 15 metres, 100 tonnes at 45 metres and a 20 metres-per-second (m/s) operational wind speed rating.
The crane was a match for the big numbers involved in the project. The main Hinkley Point C structure, Ryder says, involves about 11,000 tonnes of steelwork, alongside pre-cast concrete components. Some of the major precast items weighed 70 or 80 tonnes, while the largest roof truss weighed about 122 tonnes.
By sitting inside the turbine hall, the crane’s mast took up only a small footprint. The space outside the building, previously occupied by cranes, could instead be used for construction.
On mega engineering projects, the cranes and other construction tools become infrastructure in their own right. While the installation of machinery solves the problem at hand, it invariably creates new ones around staffing, sequencing and safety – usually requiring exclusion zones to keep workers free from harm. Reducing the number of individual cranes, Ryder explains, decreased the volume of issues to address, even as the scale went up.
Going bigger also solved the problem of wind that has blighted the Hinkley Point C project. Ryder says the crawler cranes used on Unit 1 were limited to moving items at about 9m/s, depending on configuration. Marr’s M2480D, by contrast, has a design limit of 20m/s. But at times of extreme wind, smaller crawler cranes had to stop entirely. Getting them back into service took time. The tower crane could be put into a ‘weather vane’ configuration, then brought back into use within minutes.
Hinkley’s success has set a precedent, Ryder reckons, for future projects like this in the UK. “Fewer pieces but heavier pieces,” he says. “That’s where the whole marketplace is going.”
Unit 2 worked, he says, but it could have gone further. Marr arrived relatively late, after much of the design philosophy had carried over from Unit 1. In future, he argues, the biggest gains will come when the crane strategy is baked into the design earlier. “There’s an opportunity for further modularisation,” he says, and for “increasing sizes and weights of the pieces even further”.
He points out that a two-tonne lift and a 20-tonne lift can take roughly similar time. If a project can redesign 10 small lifts into one bigger one, it can reduce complexity, time and risk. “The biggest challenge that constructors probably have is feeding material to the machine,” Ryder says.
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