Inside the plants, processes that built Nucor into a steel giant

DARLINGTON, S.C. — 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.

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“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 was still Nuclear Corp. of America. It had been in the 1950s and 1960s a struggling provider of nuclear services.

Read more about the Charlotte-based company's journey from there to its current status as a steel-making behemoth — and check out photos inside the Darlington plant — here.

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