Only 3 Facilities Worldwide Can Forge Ultra-Heavy Reactor Pressure Vessels, Creating a Multi-Year Bottleneck for Every New Nuclear Project

Reactor pressure vessels (RPVs) and steam generators require ultra-heavy forgings (300+ ton ingots) that can only be produced at a handful of facilities globally — primarily Japan Steel Works, Doosan Enerbility in South Korea, and Le Creusot (Framatome) in France — with zero domestic U.S. capability, and lead times extending 3-5 years per order. Why it matters: every new large reactor project in the Western world must compete for the same limited forging slots, so a single facility outage or quality defect (as happened at Le Creusot with carbon segregation issues discovered in 2016-2018) can cascade delays across multiple international projects simultaneously, so U.S. developers are entirely dependent on allied-nation supply chains with no fallback, so the planned global buildout of new nuclear capacity cannot physically be manufactured at current production rates (global forging capacity was approximately 5,800 tons in 2024 against rapidly growing demand), so countries serious about nuclear expansion must secure forging reservations years before they even complete reactor licensing. The structural root cause is that the post-Fukushima decade of near-zero new reactor orders (2011-2020) caused specialized manufacturers to exit the market or reduce capacity, the extreme capital cost of building a new heavy forging press ($500M+) deters new entrants, and nuclear-grade metallurgy requires ASME N-stamp certification that takes years to obtain.