| ISSUE 006 · MATERIALS, CAPACITY, CONVERSION | |
| Everyone is counting hulls, reactor orders and shipyard slots. The Navy wants more submarines, the utilities want more gigawatts, and the announcements arrive weekly. Nobody is counting the ingot, which is where both of those things stop. | |
| An open die forging press takes one hot steel ingot and squeezes it into a shape. A reactor pressure vessel shell. A turbine rotor shaft. A propeller shaft for a destroyer. A work roll for a steel mill. The ceiling on what comes out is the weight of ingot the press can accept. | |
| The World Nuclear Association, in its heavy manufacturing survey updated on 24 July 2026, puts the largest ingot handled in North America at 270 tonnes, at Lehigh Heavy Forge in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. China First Heavy Industries at Qiqihar takes 715 tonnes, Japan Steel Works at Muroran 650. The same survey says a large Generation III pressure vessel is best forged on a press of 14,000 to 15,000 tonnes accepting ingots of 500 to 600 tonnes. It adds that nothing in North America approaches the enterprises running those presses. | |
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| PLATE · OXYGEN CONVERTER, JAPANESE INTEGRATED STEELWORKS, 1980s |
| In 1980 Japan produced 111.4 million tonnes of crude steel against 101.4 million in the United States, on World Steel Association figures. It got there by building new plant through the 1960s and 1970s, with melting, casting and forging capacity in the same complex. |
| American integrated producers went the other way. Facing imports and high fixed costs, they held capital spending down rather than raised it, a pattern set out by Lieberman and Johnson in their 1999 comparison of Japanese and US steel producers. By 1984 about a tenth of American output still came from open hearth furnaces, a technology Japan had virtually eliminated by 1970, according to the IMF’s Finance and Development in December 1987. |
| A forging press sits downstream of a melt shop. The ingot has to arrive hot, so the furnace and the press stand in one complex, and that complex is sited once. The World Nuclear Association attributes the American gap partly to this, the absence of mills and melt shops able to hand a press a 600 tonne ingot. |
| PLATE · OPEN DIE FORGING PRESS, BETHLEHEM, PENNSYLVANIA | |||
| On 30 September 2024 the Department of Defense announced a $15 million award under its Defense Production Act Investments program to Lehigh Heavy Forge in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. The money buys a new forging manipulator for the plant’s 10,000 ton open die press, heat treatment furnace upgrades, and an automated ultrasonic testing regime for finished forgings. | |||
| Laura Taylor-Kale, then assistant secretary of defense for industrial base policy, said heavy forging production is needed for “naval ship shafts and critical propulsion and structural components”. The department counted it as the sixty-first award under that programme since the start of fiscal 2024, worth $617 million in total. | |||
| The Bethlehem forge started work in the 1880s, when the Navy wanted a domestic source of armour plate and gun forgings. It has been a subsidiary of WHEMCO since 1997. Alongside the 10,000 ton press it runs a 3,000 ton press for work rolls and billets. | |||
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| Every supply figure carries a date and a source in the text. Not a footnote. In the sentence. | |||
| FREE. NO STOCK PICKS. NO PREDICTIONS. | |||
| Nothing here is investment advice. No company is named as an investment. |
