The last piece of oversized equipment for the Leningrad-II Unit 2 reactor building, a vehicle airlock, was delivered from Tyazhmash, Russia’s heavy equipment manufacturer, to the port of Sosnovy Bor, a town near Saint Petersburg.

The airlock was transported by land and water. “It traveled a total of 2,100 km. We used a designated lowboy trailer and a river barge to transport the airlock,” said Igor Voronin, a representative of Russia’s freight carrier Sovfracht. “The route from Syzran to Sosnovy Bor ran along the Volga River to Lake Onega and the Gulf of Finland and took 26 days. The weather was favorable, and we delivered the airlock to Sosnovy Bor safely and on schedule.”

The vehicle airlock is a safety system designed to cut off the reactor zone from the clean zone. It is used to move fresh nuclear fuel into, and spent fuel and nuclear waste out of, the reactor building, as well as take maintenance machinery and equipment in and out of the reactor zone.

After the airlock was delivered to the port, it was transported further to the construction site to undergo the incoming inspection procedure. “After the ramp is ready and the crane is installed, the airlock will be emplaced at Level +26.00 into the round opening between the internal and external containments and welded to the metals embedded in the concrete containment walls. We plan to take this important step early next year,” said Andrei Korpachev, Senior Engineer from the Technical Supervision Department of Leningrad-II.