Samurai-Sword Maker May Cool Nuclear Revival 317
NobleSavage sends a story from Bloomberg about Japan Steel Works Ltd., a company that still makes Samurai swords, and how it may control the fate of the global nuclear-energy renaissance. "There stands the only plant in the world, a survivor of Allied bombing in World War II, capable of producing the central part of a nuclear reactor's containment vessel in a single piece, reducing the risk of a radiation leak. Utilities that won't need the equipment for years are making $100 million down payments now on components Japan Steel makes from 600-ton ingots. Each year the Tokyo-based company can turn out just four of the steel forgings that contain the radioactivity in a nuclear reactor. Even after it doubles capacity in the next two years, there won't be enough production to meet building plans."
Japan, WWII, allied bombing, and nukes (Score:5, Insightful)
+1 Ironic
May be a stupid question... (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:4 per year (Score:5, Insightful)
The Japanese firms for steel have a really good reputation for forging some of the best parts in the world. Even the Spaniards and Americans can not produce such quality steel.
I don't think I would want to be near a Chinese forged reactor core any time in my life. QC does not seem to be their strong point.
A touch sensationalist (Score:3, Insightful)
I think someone will be on top of this problem when the money is there.
fission is a bad idea anyway (Score:2, Insightful)
Nuclear fission is a poor solution anyway. Inherent safety problems, limited fuel supply (on the order of a century or two at most, perhaps much less), security concerns (both weapons technology proliferation and terrorist targeting concerns), unsolved waste disposal problems - the only reason this gets the support it does is because the military-industrial complex loves nuclear technologies, and some technical types who grew up on science fiction have a romantic attachment to Harassing the Power of the Atom.
We should be devoting our resources to efficiency, renewables (including orbital photovoltaic), accelerator-based thorium reactors [harvard.edu], and fusion. Building new fission reactors is a distraction from the real solutions.
Re:sounds like a way to re-start (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:sounds like a way to re-start (Score:5, Insightful)
How? We have no industrial base anymore. It's the "information age", we're a "service economy", remember? Actually making steel is, like, so 1970s.
U.S. Steel [wikipedia.org] now makes about as much steel now as it did in 1902. The once-mighty Bethlehem Steel [wikipedia.org]? Gone. National Steel [wikipedia.org]? Kaput.
We traded our ability to make stuff, for our ability to by cheap imports at Wal*Mart.
Re:fission is a bad idea anyway (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:sounds like a way to re-start (Score:0, Insightful)
Re:Toshiba's small reactors (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:Slightly sensationalist summary I feel (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:sounds like a way to re-start (Score:5, Insightful)
It really doesn't matter where cheap steel is coming from; it isn't particularly profitable to make, and it is the easiest capacity to add, so why should anybody be surprised that American companies aren't trying to compete with cheaper foreign labor for the title of biggest steel company?
Japan Steel Works a sword maker (Score:5, Insightful)
I mean seriously, Slashdot, isn't this story cool enough without adding misleading sensationalist crap onto it?
Re:Change the design (Score:4, Insightful)
All makes perfect sense, until (Score:5, Insightful)
Until you actually read the article and see that your cheap foreign labour is in Japan? Japan hasn't been cheap in decades.
Oh and where are those Intel chips actually produced?
Read up on Henry Ford and exactly why he allowed his factory workers special loans to buy the cars they produced. If a rabid capatalist understood, why don't you?
Re:All makes perfect sense, until (Score:5, Insightful)
(and Alcoa and Intel make stuff all over the world; this doesn't change the fact that they have significant production operations in the United States)
I'm wasn't responding to the lamentation that the U.S. is apparently incapable of producing one of these giant forgings, I was responding to the ridiculous idea that all the economic activity of whatever golden age of American industry up and disappeared. It didn't disappear, it shifted to other activity, and when you count things up, there is more industry here than there was 25 or 50 years ago. So yes, as a percentage of our overall economy, heavy industry has dropped, but the economy has grown so much that the actual amount of heavy industry has increased, and instead of just paying people to work in steel mills, we can pay them to do silly things like program computers.
And the U.S. is actually a pretty popular place to do heavy industry. We are politically stable, have cheap, available energy(Coal!) and a good portion of the workforce is highly skilled. We certainly don't have a monopoly on any of those things, but it's hard to argue that we should.
Re:Hm (Score:3, Insightful)
Thanks, I enjoyed that.
Re:The only one for sure? (Score:3, Insightful)
As others have said, the USA is a place of ideas. Intellectual property and services are our business. It is just a shame that it won't last forever. We are now in a global market place where services and IP can be created and hosted anywhere in the world, for anyone in the world. I fear that the countries with less restrictive laws will become data havens and will overtake the USA in these markets. When that happens, we won't have manufacturing, IP, or services... I guess there is always litigation, time to buy stock in SCO!