Nuclear component manufacturing in the United States
Sometimes the web and its infrastructure provide some interesting surprises. As I have mentioned several times in this blog, one of my many news sources is a daily email from Google Alerts that provides links to every article that it has found in the past 24 hours with the word “Unistar”.
That unique search term is the name of the partnership company formed by Areva, Constellation Energy, and Bechtel for the purpose of building a fleet of nuclear power plants. Each of the plants produced will be part of an identical series, with the first series using Areva’s US EPR which is based on the European Pressurize Reactor (EPR) design.
This morning, my daily alert provided me a link to an article in the Northwest Indiana News by DAN CATERINICCHIA titled Nuclear plant business slated for Indiana:Components to be manufactured in Mount Vernon, west of Evansville. I thought that some of the information looked awfully familiar, but there were details in the story that I thought were worth mentioning.
Once I started this blog entry, I realized that the story was actually published for the first time on 2 August, 2006, more than a month ago. In the old days of paper publishing, this story would probably never have resurfaced unless I was making a monthly recycling run.
Anyway – go take a look at the story and recognize it for what it is – a local news story providing residents information about a potentially exciting recovery of a local business that has had its struggles but provides excellent jobs when its business is good.
The BWX Technologies Mount Vernon manufacturing facility has provided some important, high quality parts for ships and submarines for decades, but that business has slowed rather dramatically since the early 1990s. Its reentry into the commercial nuclear power plant component market is good news indeed, especially for the local economy.
