Company profile: Nucor Steel.

• Author: Nelson, Eric
• Position: Nucor Corp. - Regional Report - Company profile

You can't blame Nucor Corp. for gloating a bit. The Charlotte, N.C.-based steel manufacturer's revolutionary thin-slab casting process had never been used commercially. And the company's new $300 million plant, located just south of Crawfordsville, was admittedly a gamble.

Even the West German firm that supplied the technology was skeptical, recalls Keith Busse, Nucor vice president and general manager. "They told us: 'Don't get too excited about th is project. It takes ]8to 24 months to get any new steel mill to a break-even posture or profitable state, so with a new technology, don't expect to do it in a time frame any shorter. We doubt it's going to happen.'"

But it did happen. Production capacity has been near 100 percent since June, when the Crawfordsville plant recorded its first month of profit. Employment exceeded 400 and the sales book is full through the end of this year. Nucor's 1 million ton per year production goal should be reached early in 1991. "We've far exceeded everyone's expectations," Busse says.

There were, however, many obstacles along the road to success, Busse concedes. The first was finding a successful thin-slab steel casting process, a challenge that dates back some I 00 years.

"Researchers have known for years that if you could cast a thin slab, you'd end up with superior metallurgical properties because of the rapid solidification and very fine grain structure the process produces," Busse explains. "It's something people in the steel industry have had an interest in for a long period of time, but there's just never been technology available to produce high-quality end results."

Nucor experimented with its own thin-slab casting process in the early 1980s, but quality and maintenance concerns slowed the development, Busse says. Others encountered similar obstacles. "The Japanese and Italians were fooling around with a couple different processes, and U.S. Steel, Bethlehem Steel and the U.S. Department of Energy had been experimenting with a thin-slab caster for a number of years without achieving any substantial success," he says.

When West Germany's SMS finally achieved positive results in 1986, Nucor quickly purchased the technology, Busse says. The biggest challenge, though, was still ahead. "We had evaluated the process but there was no commercial facility operating anywhere in the world."

The first step was finding a suitable site for the facility. The search began in the South, but was quickly shifted to the...