It's also useful if you want to do concrete demolition yourself using only hand tools. You drill holes, pour, wait for cracks, and then use a pick and hammer to remove the remaining chunks. Often sold as "expansive grout".
If you can drill holes you can use stone splitting wedges.
A lot of these high dollar modern miracles of chemical engineering are purely for use in situations where it's cheaper to just buy the $100/tube stuff than it is to try and get the approval to do something sensible. Basically you're paying to get around process tech debt.
Not in a refinery, or you have to buy weird/expensive non-sparking hammers and wedges. Aluminum bronze wedges are commercially available but the liability insurance is incredible so you're better off cutting your own (its a wedge, not a rocket engine...). It ends up being cheaper to use the expansive grout.
This is exactly what I mean by "paying to get around process tech debt"
Facility has a "no sparks" in buildings A, B and C rule. Rule obviously doesn't apply to contractors doing a ton of welding during a holiday shutdown. Non-contractors in maintenance dept want to fix some other crap at the same time. Sure they could try and get approval to use a jackhammer concurrent with the other work but in reality there's a 75% chance the safety department will intentionally stonewall until after the shutdown rather than set the precedent of a sensible exemption and the maintenance manager knows it so they buy the expensive grout.
Murphys Law implies the contractors will not be legally permitted onsite during operation so who cares what they do, but if you let the full timers play with jackhammers its guaranteed some idiot will try to use the jackhammer after operation resumes. So you'd need to do something like have the safety officer personally responsible for removing the jackhammer from the premises. Or renting it, perhaps.
