How US Steel Can No Longer Say We Can Build It

I was leafing through the Business of Green special section for Earth Day in Thursday's NY Times and saw something that disturbed me. In an article named Edging Back to Nuclear Power, the topic covered is how there is a renaissance in the demand for nuclear power and new power plants. Being a product of the 70's and 80's, I know enough about the fear of nuclear meltdown and nuclear war to last me multiple lifetimes. But that is not what bothered me. Here is what I read that did the trick:

One symptom of the national ambivalence about nuclear power is that the American industry no longer has the ability to build 100 reactors itself; the American steel industry no longer has the capacity to build the biggest parts, the reactor vessels.

Really? So when did we become pussies who found it easy to say we can't when a few generations ago all we could say was we can. What happened to the power of US Steel? It has been replaced by overseas producers of steel such as the Japan Steel Works. As the article describes it:

Most of such parts comes from Japan Steel works, which takes 600-ton steel ingots and presses them like Play Doh into the appropriate shape. It recently installed its second press and planned to be able to build 12 reactor vessels a year.

For an American company to do the same would require an enormous capital investment.

So while the proverbial Rome burns, our citizens stand by arguing about who should be covered by health insurance, how to curb the flow of illegal aliens and celebrating the rise of mediocrity found on reality TV and other media. We've allowed ourselves, through hubris and false bravado to deteroirate to the point that an island country not even a quarter of the size of our country with limited natural resources, to make products with ease in the same way we did in the 1940's and 1950's. Nothing against Japan, more power to them, but the way this country has become dependent on foreign oil, foreign manpower and foreign products, we've become a rotten, rusted and broken down shell of our former selves.

Hey, the consolation is that now the United States is part of the global economy, right?. Hello? We WERE the global economy. We rebuilt the same Europe and Japan after World War II that has vaulted past us in all aspects in recent years. Truly embarrasing.

I'm not one to be all rah rah and ultra patriotic but instead of our fellow Americans acting like petulant children in the schoolyard arguing about bullshit, we should look inward, pull ourselves up by our proverbial bootstraps take our asses to work rebuilding ourselves, for ourselves, by ourselves.