Tennessee Hits High Note with Much-Anticipated Start of Nucor's New Bar Mill

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Researched by Industrial Info Resources (Sugar Land, Texas)-- Nucor Corporation (NYSE:NUE) (Charlotte, North Carolina) has selected Danieli & C. SpA (Buttrio, Italy) to install the equipment in a new bar mill and rebuilding of the idle Memphis site it acquired in its takeover of Birmingham Steel Corporation. Nucor's new special bar quality (SBQ) mill comes with the impressive price tag of $250 million. See related January 9, 2007, article - Nucor Starts 2007 with a Bang - Moves Forward with Capital Projects and Acquisitions in North America.

Danieli also supplied much of the new equipment and all the process equipment for the melt shop and rolling mill, including electrical trappings, as well as Level 1 and 2 automation systems for the entire plant. At the core of the new melt shop is a 90-ton ultra high-power FastArc single-charge EAF. Secondary refining will be performed by a new ladle metallurgy station and a twin-tank vacuum degasser, equipped with combined steam-ejectors/water ring pumps. The new three-strand bloom caster will produce rounds ranging from 267 mm to 511 mm in diameter. The original rolling mill was installed when the plant was built in 1997, and it is being converted from a billet mill to a line producing finished SBQ at 150 tons per hour.

Equipment:

Finishing facilities include abrasive disc sawing, in-line straightening, non-destructive testing for surface and internal defects, chamfering, marking, stacking, tying and final collection. The new 150-ton-per-hour walking-beam reheat furnace is being linked directly to the caster for hot charging. A water-cooling box and shot-blasting station at the exit end of the cooling bed will cool and clean SBQ bars before entering a NTD inspection system. The 1,050-mm diameter reversing breakdown mill includes work tables and manipulators for automatic operation and a reconfigured six-stand intermediate/finishing mill, has two relocated roughing stands.

The mill's products will be finished rounds and squares ranging from 57 mm to 230 mm in diameter, and semi-finished squares of 305 mm and 203 mm, for re-rolling. The variety of SBQ grades, both engineered and specialty steels, will be marketed to automotive and mechanical construction manufacturers.

Founded in 1819 Memphis was only four blocks wide and had a population of about 50 people. It's now the largest city in Tennessee with a population of more than 670,000. Memphis can now include on its résumé the 850,000-square-foot Nucor steel SBQ mill. Construction started over a year ago, and production is expected to start in late May or early June 2008.

In addition to the Memphis project, Nucor has a large number of capital projects ongoing at other of their plants throughout North America.

•Birmingham, Alabama - $7 million
•Jackson, Mississippi - $9 million
•Tuscaloosa, Alabama - $15 million
•Crawfordsville, Indiana - $20 million
•Huger, South Carolina - $45 million
•Trinity, Alabama - $150 million

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