Forging Steel This is a 300 ton forged ring passing through Japan Steel Works Ltd. This facility has 80% market share for nuclear reactor pressure vessels (RPV). Their order book is full. They have mastered… • controlled melting • vacuum degassing • superheated liquid handling • giant bar casting • electric preheating • hydraulic forge pressing • hot punching • open die mandrel pressing • dewarping • ring rolling • electric pit heating • quenching • tempering • machining • NDT testing of sample prolongations They do this with pieces of steel that are 540 tons, for most of the steps the steel is 1,600°F. The scale of the equipment you need to handle something like this is pure sci fi. The number of steps in the process is no joke. You make 1 mistake along the way and the whole thing is often scrapped and has to be remade. You have to keep all of this equipment calibrated, even as it goes through brutal thermal cycles and takes weeks to cool down. This is why giant forging is so hard. But it’s doable, people do it. A big part of what makes this expensive is that everything is made-to-order and the orders are all bespoke. This means retooling for every run, which means recalibrating, which means you often don’t get it right first time, which means there is a lot of losses and reruns… Which means lead times are long. That plus the order book is full. This process is deeply esoteric, but it is also ripe for innovation. It is big, it is heavy… but JSW can turn $3m of steel into a $200m component. And they have 80% market share. Suddenly the world needs infrastructure and this is the global bottleneck for an awful lot of it.