Yesterday was a fairly warm day. And plastics do suffer from a great amount of thermal expansion, the trouble is getting a sufficient amount of chiller agent to do the job and the last thing you need is any extra weight as getting this thing out will be hard enough as it is.
Steaming the crap outta the guts of it then maybe purging it with an inert gas like CO2   or N2 , might do it, but all this experimenting is starting to sound expensive, would it be easier to just cut the bastard up and replace it, but off course that would depend on a replacements availability, probably not all that thick on the ground here in OZ, second hand units are most likely next to non existent due to the fact that no bastard can get 'em out, and new ones are probably hideously expensive to to the cost of shipping something of that bulky.

Some years ago the company I worked for had a demolition job at a functioning tobacco factory, It was a fixed price quote, and amongst the problems we had was to demolish a large  concrete bund.... this bastard of a thing was made in a way that I'd never encountered the reinforcing wasn't by steel bar, no it was a random network of fine strand wires a bit like fiberglass pumped through a chopper gun! This stuff was tough sledge hammers hardly made any impact and jack hammers were way to slow and labourious. to make matters worse this bund was located on an upper floor!

What I did was get in an excavator, (what you Poms call a digger) But this came with a whole new set of problems, 1st was one of access, I craned it into the upper floor, with a bloody great crane, then the client quite understandably didn't want diesel exhaust gasses in their still working factory, so I got as much flexible exhaust pipe as I could muster,and attached this to the diesel's exhaust but it still wasn't long enough to reach outside the building so it was in turn attached to some PVC drainage pipe to get the sufficient reach to get the pestulant gasses outside. this Heath Robinsonesque set up actually worked with me dragging the hose and pipe combination around as the excavator worked. 
Well this got us outta trouble, but here is the relevant bit, it was amazing how much the PVC pipe expanded with the exhaust heat it swelled up to a much larger diameter It wasn't to hot to handle with my hands so there was sufficient length of flexible exhaust to allow it to cool with out melting the PVC, but still it swelled to buggery!

Anyway back to the original problem.........I got me some thinking and research to do!
I wanted some mad science thinking to do when I cooked up the K series V8 thread........and now providence has provided some..... the moral of this story is be careful of what you wish for!
And right now, currently my wishes involve thousands of tiny demons with red hot pitchforks tormenting the gentleman's sausage, wedding vegetables and fundamental orifice of both the bastard at the petrol station and the dribbling idiot who came up with the plan to use a plastic fuel tank!

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