Suffice it to say that the Scenic City has become Farfegnooga. Since July 2008, when banners were first erected to "Willkommen Volkswagen," the city has gazed unwaveringly at its own outskirts, marking time by media reports on the massive auto plant being built at Enterprise South Park.

Meanwhile, on Chattanooga's historic riverfront, another big project is taking shape with far less fanfare, but no less significance. With a $300 million, 350,000-square-foot expansion, Alstom Power is reawakening a long-dormant spirit of the city's manufacturing past—the slide-rule zeitgeist of the nuclear power industry.

Thirty years ago, on the spot where Alstom now makes replacement parts for coal-fired plants, Combustion Engineering was one of the largest nuclear component suppliers in the world; its 5,700 workers helped power the Tennessee Valley Authority's push into the atomic age. TVA itself employed more than 50,000 people, until cost overruns and public safety concerns all but shuttered the nuclear power industry.

Alstom was quick to join the nuclear renaissance. In 2007, with new reactors in the pipeline at TVA and across the United States, Alstom named Chattanooga as its first American manufacturing site for new turbine rotors and generator stators, supplying both nuclear and fossil-fuel plants. It will be the world's largest balancing facility, set for completion next summer.

In a city hungry for manufacturing, Alstom's celebrated announcement was overshadowed months later by the highly anticipated VW decision, with its promise of 2,000 jobs and exponential ripple effect. Still, Chattanooga Mayor Ron Littlefield says, the quiet revival of nuclear in the Tennessee Valley, with Alstom at the forefront, may be the economic engine that yields the most mileage.

"I think Alstom stands to have a greater effect than Volkswagen over time," he says, "because it is restoring the whole nuclear industry and all that feeds and nourishes it to Chattanooga."

Certainly, Chattanooga's nuclear workforce will never have the numbers it once did. Alstom expects 350 new hires by 2012; Westinghouse has grown from 75 to 120 employees since 2008, and may hire 100 more. But what can't be quantified is the intellectual capital those jobs represent, which can be transformative for a city, Littlefield says. Engineering firms are again moving to Chattanooga, albeit under the radar, he notes. "The funny thing about the nuclear industry is that it doesn't like to make a lot of noise. You’re dealing with a lot of highly trained people, and they're a little shy about publicity."

Kurt Greene, human resources director for Alstom in Chattanooga, says his challenge is filling the experience gap left when the U.S. nuclear industry lost a generation. Alstom is sending its first hires to Europe for six months' training, he says -- and it's helping generate new brainpower at home. "We see this renaissance emerging, and we are in the early days of setting up relationships with regional universities to breathe life back into nuclear engineering in a way that would apply to us on the manufacturing side."