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Samurai-Sword Maker May Cool Nuclear Revival
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."
So what I want to know is... can they make me a sword out of uranium? Now THAT would be sweet.
This sounds like an area where American metal working could enjoy some sort of renaissance. I wonder what the start-up costs for such an endeavor are, what the future growth and profit margins are, and where such competency could be applied outside of reactors and and swords. But, with low skill metal working being outsourced, such specialized skills might be a place for America to specialize, especially as the dollar continues to fall.
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These story elements (Japan, WWII, Allied bombing and nuclear technology) usually have a different theme than protecting the world from the hazards of nuclear fission gone awry.
+1 Ironic
-- @rjamestaylor on Ello
But can't you make more places to build them? I realize that you may need specific hardware to forge this stuff out of one piece of steel, but seems to me that if you really needed them, you could make more than one factory.
The guys who make Swiss Army knives have nearly perfected fusion reactors. That can open wine bottles.
Ergonomica Auctorita Illico!
Swords are not exactly a growth industry. If they are genuine samurai swords, they can't be exported, and if they aren't, they are practically worthless (about the same price as the cheap Spanish ones they sell on QVC).
The 5 year gap is important because during that 5 years, they'd expect to be able to increase capacity while other forgers would still be getting started.
However, the problem is China and its vast natural resources. Japan, unfortunately doesn't have the natural resources to do this cheaply for very long. As China (and I suppose Korea) get their furnaces running, the customers will start looking to cheaper pastures.
As I understand it CANDU reactors don't even use a pressure vessel as such, but instead uses an assembly of pressurized tubes. One for each fuel bundle. This design was chosen precisely because it eliminated the need for this type of technological bottleneck and it is still in use today. I think tfa neglects to mention that there are several reactor designs that aren't dependent on this particular company.
This article is from 2006. Surely there's more recent news, even about this topic?
Please don't use "umm" or "err" or "erm".
Major questions , with the track record as of late from China would you trust a major piece of a nuclear puzzle to them ? I mean it really. And with Korea , I don't know if I would trust them as well.
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.
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I am puzzled. In last thirty years, our country in the heart of Europe has independently manufactured about twenty five complete reactor units. And we're not exactly the pinnacle of the world's engineering, even though compared to our neighbours, we might be pretty good. I would expect USA and other western countries having much more resources than us to be more independent in this respect. Now it may be that the qualiry criteria have been tightened up a little, but still, USA, for example, is a huge country. Don't tell me that a country capable of delivering people to Moon and space probes to the outer Solar system can't manufacture even a single bloody reactor vessel.
Ezekiel 23:20
There weren't any factories that built Apollo's when we decided to go to the moon but somehow we managed.
I think someone will be on top of this problem when the money is there.
New nuclear build is not going to grind to a halt because this plant can't keep up.
"Physics is to math as sex is to masturbation." -R. Feynman
>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.
On the plus side, it is very likely to come coated in lead.
That's good in this case, right?
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, and fusion. Building new fission reactors is a distraction from the real solutions.
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You cannot wash away blood with blood
I work reasonably closely with manufacturers of all sorts of marine equipment. Lifeboat davits, cranes, winches, diesel engines, etc. The most common thing they do when they can't source a part is change the design. This encourages innovation, and usually the new design is safer than the old one anyway. If you're waiting on a part for 2+ years for a crane, are you going to wait and see if someone else starts manufacturing them? No. You're going to change that design (maybe 6 months, probably less) and build it.
Nuclear engineering may be a lot different since everyone wants to stick with what has worked in the past, but can't getting the parts to build something usually results in a new design in my experience.
Even those who arrange and design shrubberies are under considerable economic stress at this period in history.
Does the sword run Linux?
Its nice to be important but its more important to be nice
to a Hanzo Hattori sword?
The "practically worthless" swords, from a Japanese perspective, would be anything NOT made in Japan. Most of the cheap wallhangers that you see out there in the marketplace are from China, believe it or not.
+that's funny...I don't FEEL tardy.+
If it takes three weeks to forge one vessel, why can they only produce four vessels per year?
Also, the forging is described as a cylinder, which leaves the top and bottom of the pressure vessel. How do you weld 30 cm thick steel? ISTR reading about submarine construction (which use a pressure hull maybe a few cm thick) where welding the hull sections had to take place at night because daytime operations would overload the local power grid. These vessels would be even more difficult to weld correctly.
, they are relatively "clean", and employ lots of white collar/upper middle class workers. Most communities were glad to have them built nearby. Especially, when they were helping "beat those commies to the moon".
A heavy steel forging operation, OTOH, would face opposition because of the smokestack emissions, and the ingrained idea that we don't need workers who actually MAKE anything anymore, when we can base our entire economy on shuffling money around and suing each other.
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I think the article confuses the reactor vessel with the containment vessel.
A reactor vessel is a large-room-sized steel vessel, that holds the fuel and steam transfer pipes and so forth and is subjected to huge internal pressures in normal operation.
A containment vessel is the building-sized concrete structure that gives many reactors buildings their impressive dome shape. It is only important in the case of an accident, when it might be subjected to pressures on the order of an atmosphere or so. It is intended to hold in or contain any radioactive materials released after an accident has occurred.
Interestingly enough, in light of his demonization by anti-nuclear factions, it was Edward Teller who was largely responsible for insisting on containment vessels, a nice simple brute-force protection measure.
Every reactor has a reactor vessel, but not all reactors have containment vessels. Some reactors, such as Chernobyl, and, in the United States, GE boiling-water reactors such as the one in Plymouth, Massachusetts have very ordinary-looking block-like buildings rather than containment domes. These reactors are designed to "suppress" pressure in an accident rather than "contain" it, by the use of engineered mechanisms that open valves at the right time and direct steam through big tanks of water, cooling it down and condensing it.
"How to Do Nothing," kids activities, back in print!
Check out your neighbors' back yards. Based on even that superficial check, how many of them would you trust to maintain a small nuclear power plant?
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I'm sure China is capable of certifying and delivering these new designs at a lower cost.
for nuclear reactors. they're building them to ENSLAVE WHALES
maybe the japanese are trying to NUKE THE WHALES?
first fake scientific research, now this?
will the japanese stop at nothing to satisfy their insatiable whale flesh thirst?
intellectual property law is philosophically incoherent. it is your moral duty to ignore it or sabotage it
It is cheaper for now. China's got problems, possibly big problems. They got huge pollution problems, and they've got run away inflation, plus the standard of living is rising in the cities. Effectively the cost advantage of "Made in China" is rapidly eroding. Some of the cheap manufacturers are now looking to relocate to different Asian countries where the labour costs are now lower than China.
Fanatically anti-fanatical
They have tours of Japan Steel Work's sword factories, following link has some pictures:
http://ameblo.jp/machizukuri-engineer/entry-10070632943.html
An older example of the swords they make (from the Russo-Japanese war):
http://www.e-sword.jp/sale/0650/0650_1006syousai.htm
The company also uses sword-making as a source of research that they apply to other field's of forging
http://ci.nii.ac.jp/naid/110001457129/
To call Japan Steel Works a "sword maker" is like referring to Microsoft as "that company that makes Minesweeper". Japan Steel Works is a very large steel company that makes a very wide variety of products (of which swords are a very, very small part) and did $2 billion worth of sales in 2007 alone.
I mean seriously, Slashdot, isn't this story cool enough without adding misleading sensationalist crap onto it?
The
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?
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You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Just a note: But you did realize that the natural background radiation in that part of the world is in some places several times over the safe legal limit in all contries that have such a law. If fact one of the hotest places is in nothrern Iraq/ Iran.
Undetectable Steganography? Yep, there's an app fo
Nuclear reactor pressure vessels are a real problem. Most of the larger ones are in fact built up from welded sections. This isn't an easy welding job, and inspection of welds is a big headache. Several Japanese nuclear plants have had problems with cracks in pressure vessel welds, although in internal reactor components welded to the shell, not the shell itself. So making the pressure vessel and its internal support structures from one big forging makes a better product.
The environment of a reactor pressure vessel is tough. First, there's "embrittlement". Neutrons are constantly blasting apart the atoms in the pressure vessel, and over a period of years, this structural damage adds up. Then there's corrosion. There have been major corrosion problems requiring reactor shutdowns from carbon dioxide and boric acid corrosion inside the pressure vessel. Remember, this is a steam pressure vessel; at steam temperatures and pressures, minor corrosive effects at room temperature become big problems.
High quality welding of thick steel sections is a tough problem. Many approaches have been tried. The general idea is to make a V-shaped notch and fill it in during the welding process. Doing this in a way that's no weaker than the surrounding material is hard. Electric arc welding under an inert gas is the usual approach. Electron beam welding and laser welding have been tried. Then there's the problem of approach angle - welding on a vertical surface is not easy. Quality control requires X-rays, ultrasonic tests, and regulators that aren't corrupt.
So there's much to be said for building the pressure vessel as one big forging. Of course, then there's the problem of delivering a 550-ton object to the job site. There are companies that can do that, if you can find them a clear path from a seaport.
Sword making technology is relevant to the making of big forgings. Swords are built-up forgings. This is unusual in modern metalworking; most modern forged objects, like tools, are banged out in one piece by equipment much larger than the thing being manufactured. Big pressure vessels are built-up forgings; the scale requires it. In Japan, it's considered a good doctoral thesis in metallurgy to improve on sword making technology. So smart people are still thinking about the technology of built-up forgings. Nobody else bothers much.
Here's a US NRC fact sheet. on pressure vessels, and a similar European document.
Of course depleted uranium and "regular" uranium have the same effect on the body - they are the SAME thing. It would be like saying that there is this regular Oxygen that is different from the special Oxygen-16 and Oxygen-18. Chemically, they are identical, just like Uranium vs. U-235 vs. U-238.
Furthermore, "regular" Uranium and "depleted" Uranium and "enriched" Uranium have nothing to do with it being Uranium or not. It only has to do with Uranium-235 abundance. Regular just has under 1% of the U-235 and the depleted has "less". But it is still Uranium!!! Heck, the two types have virtually identical radioactivity (depleted vs. natural)
And chemically, they pose the same problems because they have identical chemical properties (because both are Uranium!)
Anyone saying that DU is safe is full of *shit*. We all know that Uranium mining and smelting can be hazardous tasks. Spreading it around in dust form and saying the opposite in light of the truth and past experiences is criminal.
The lethality of DU is directly proportional to the delivery velocity.
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