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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
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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.
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?
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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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New nuclear build is not going to grind to a halt because this plant can't keep up.
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>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?
The problem here is not wanting to stick with currently proven designs, but the hideous cost of certifying a new design. It is so expensive to re-certify a project after a design change people really don't want to do it often.
The certification process probably makes the design safer, but it also disincentives innovation in ways that would horrify someone used to the rapid pace of consumer electronics.
On the other hand, the kind of reliability standards we see on consumer electronics would horrify me if they ever happened be applied to a nuclear facility or an airplane.
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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.
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.
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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?
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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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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.