Areva and many others - in Asia in particular - know how to handle large forgings. The notion that there is some great dark art at Japan Steel that cannot be duplicated is bunk. Large forgings are complex beasts and require some serious competences but they are not rocket science. The journo is just pissing what Japan Steel fed him. If you know how to work on 200t pieces, you can learn how to work with 600t fairly quickly.

It's above all an equipment issue. Those forgings require very large annealing ovens and drop-hammers, rollers and presses large and powerful enough to handle the size and thickness of those pieces. It also requires things like very large vertical lathes for finishing, etc. Those tools are all one-of-a-kind equipments, designed and built on order. Very long lead times. Horrendously expensive. Huge sunk costs.

The situation is that new PWR designs rely on very large pressure vessels with very thick walls for higher operating pressure and temperature and very long lifetimes under neutron-induced fatigue. They also want to avoid vertical solder joints in the core area which are seriously limiting for lifetime under neutrons.

And after the nuclear slump in the 80s, only Japan Steel was pig-headed enough to carry on investing and maintaining equipments for those super-large forgings. Nuclear is one of the rare few markets for those beasts, given that new materials have made large single forgings fairly obsolete for a lot of applications.

So, as of today, there's a nice chicken-and-eggs problem. As the nuclear market is still very tentative, no one else wants to invest in large forging. And as there is a serious bottleneck on large forgings, potential clients have cold feet, giving no incentive to invest.

Rivals are working to break the Japan Steel stranglehold, including South Korea's Doosan Heavy Industries & Construction Co. and Japan Casting & Forging Corp., a joint venture of Nippon Steel Corp. and Mitsubishi Steel Manufacturing Co.

Oh, to break a stranglehold! You can already see them donning their finest Togukawa-era armor, sharpening their katanas and their naginatas, getting ready to attack the Japan Steel citadel! Why is Kurosawa dead when you need him?

Or more exactly, Japan Steel's rivals are all scratching their chins and wondering "Seriously, how am I gonna recoup my investment if this nuclear thing fizzles?". If the orders keep piling in the queue, someone will take the plunge.

But just saying that doesn't make for a good breathless story with bits of samurai in it. Bummer...