The Big Take
As Nuclear Power Makes a Comeback, South Korea Emerges a Winner
The country has built up the best large-scale atomic-energy industry outside China and Russia. Now it stands to reap financial and diplomatic rewards.
A worker grinds the inner surface of a nuclear reactor’s steam generator at the Doosan Enerbility plant in Changwon, South Korea.
Photographer: Jun Michael Park for Bloomberg Businessweek
A machine the height of an eight-story building is working around the clock in the South Korean port city of Changwon, bearing down on massive slabs of red-hot steel with the force of 240,000 men. Doosan Enerbility Co.’s forging press—the world’s largest of its kind—sculpts the glowing, hissing metal into shafts for ships, rollers for steel mills and other building blocks of global industry.
These days, it’s making a lot of parts for nuclear reactors.