Doyle Hopper enjoys showing off the 470-worker Nucor Steel South Carolina plant in Darlington, where he is general manager and a vice president of parent Nucor Corp.
“You could say this is where Nucor began,” he says, preparing to take a reporter and photographer on a tour. “It’s the first electric arc furnace in the United States.”
On a typical day, about 300 Nucor employees work the lines there. At one end of the plant, they load scrap steel and iron from the yard, run it through the melt shop (including the furnace that heats the scrap to about 3,000 degrees) and cast it into long continuous bars. It takes up to 52 minutes to run from the conveyor belt to the finished product. The run ends with the cast steel bars turned into coils of 7/32-inch steel rods.
The Darlington plant was called the Eastern Carolina Steel Mill when it started production in 1969.
At the time, Nucor (NYSE: NUE) was still Nuclear Corp. of America. It had been in the 1950s and 1960s a struggling provider of nuclear services. The company bought its first steel products fabrication plant in Florence, South Carolina, in 1962. The Vulcraft plant was run by Ken Iverson. Vulcraft then had added a second steel products fabrication plant in Nebraska and became Nuclear Corp.’s most profitable division. After Nuclear Corp. filed for bankruptcy in 1965, it rebuilt as a steel maker. And Iverson became its chief executive.
Nuclear Corp. built the Darlington plant to supply the raw bar for the Florence operation. Nucor opted not to build the traditional blast furnaces relied upon by the then-giants of the nation’s steel industry such as U.S. Steel and Bethlehem Steel.
Electric arc furnaces cost less to build and are more flexible, Hopper says. Large blast furnaces cannot easily be started and restarted and cannot easily vary production.
“It’s a great advantage that we can run our plants when they need to run and let them go down when they need to be down,” he says.
Electric arc furnaces also need fewer raw materials such as the coke or other additives used in blast furnaces. Its principal raw material is scrap steel.
The advantages became immediately obvious to Iverson and Nuclear Corp. as the Darlington plant “just took off.” Hopper says. Two years after Darlington was built, the company renamed itself Nucor.
Nucor uses electric arc furnaces for all steel production. Although about 70% of the steel produced in the world still comes from traditional blast furnaces, Nucor has been the largest steel producer in the United States since 2014.
The Darlington plant is capable of producing about 1 million tons of steel a year. It makes what is known as merchant bar-quality steel in a variety of shapes for fabricating.
Despite the importance of the electric arc furnace — and the key role Darlington plays as the first such plant for Nucor and the United States — Hopper says the driving force of Nucor is its corporate culture and its employees. Like every Nucor executive, he calls them “teammates” rather than employees. “Anybody can buy the technology. Anybody can put in the equipment. What makes Nucor different is our people.”