3 Sep
2012
3 Sep
'12
2:19 p.m.
Hi Jim,
The reduction plants / smelters in Vancouver, Longview and Goldendale
Wa. and Troutdale and
The Dalles Or. were shutdown in the last decade and were demolished
Google sits near The Dalles former site.
I think a few plants are still operating in the Pacific NW and in BC.
We now have excess power in the area from the wind farms. Unfortunately,
that power is sporadic.
New distribution systems are being constructed to ship the power to the
Southwest.
From what I have read, sustaining the high desert lifestyle will not be
possible without a reliable supply of water.
The original source of continuous power is the BPA ( Bonneville Power
Administration ),
the operators of the hydro-power complex on the Columbia River.and the
reason those plants were built.
The destroyed plants could now be used to burn off the excess and
prevent having idle wind turbines.
I worked in the industry for 5 years building process control systems,
until Gulf war 1 and the USSR meltdown
caused the aluminum market to crash. Massive dumping of metal by the
Russians trying to stave off financial disaster
in the early 90's, the Southwest population boom and the deregulated
power market sealed the industry's fate.
It was rumored in the industry the Russians had huge stockpiles of
strategic metal reserves buried in Siberia.
You are right about shutting down and restarting a plant. It takes about
a year to fully restart a smelter. Goldendale
went through a restart after shutting down in the late 80's. The plant
had about 600 reduction cells and consumed
enough power to run a small city.
To keep this on topic, The reduction process control system was
originally built with a Nova mini driven analog data multiplexer
fed into a Modcomp for process control. We later updated the process
control to a later model Modcomp.
A Data General Eclipse was used for production reporting. The lab used a
PDP-8 based X-ray analyzer and
the carbon plant was based on Mot 6800 boxes and Analog Devices uMac
5000 process control systems.
I was pretty disappointed the last time I visited in 95 and discovered
the eclipse had been dumped into the tip
and replaced with PC clones.
About your comment on rare earths, We will be screwed if we get into a
pissing match with the Chinese.
Around here, Most of the timberland and mining claims are owned by
foreign corporations, Sold by the feds
for token payments. When US corps owned the land, It was generally open.
Now gates block all access.
Jim.
jim s wrote:
On 9/3/2012 1:22 AM, jimpdavis wrote:
I don't remember writing that rather caustic
diatribe. Or what I was
replying to.
jimpdavis wrote:
> Strategic materials my ass,
> The aluminum smelter
Are you referring to a bauxite to aluminum reduction
plant or just a
casting plant? sometimes they plants shut down simply because the
bauxite supply nearby plays out, or the power and other costs change
for the worse.
They operate in a mode also of having to have casting orders in for
the output of their operations because they can't really easily turn
them off. When they have extra metal they have hot they have to put
it somewhere, and what they used to do with it if they had to was cast
it into 50 to 100 ton pigs and ship them elsewhere. However when they
surrendered the energy that it took to keep it molten, it was a loss.
Usually they didn't use that metal once it was cooled.
I've visited both a plant in South Carolina, Alumax, and one east of
Evansville, In, Alcoa, both which still have good supplies of cheap
power and ore.
I assume even if they were to have had the situation where they don't
have direct orders and are shipping to China, the Chinese and foreign
buyers would be taking the metal from plants here, simply because we
have fairly cheap power. Indiana is coal, near fairly large open face
mines and the one in North Carolina gets about 1/2 of a hydro plant in
Georgia.
Thought I'd ask as I don't have much idea of how the west coast plants
are doing.
It could be that the plants were displaced which sucks for localities,
but hopefully it is still cheaper to process the ore here and have
some jobs, rather than shipping raw materials only and getting zippo
for loosing our natural resources.
I guess the Chinese are waking up about rare earths now and have been
on to what they have there. I know the non US members of the list
probably have different views, and am aware of all of the resource
export that goes on, especially in Africa.
I have not seen any quantitative comparison of how iron in the steel
has changed, but there are a lot of mini-mills which have replaced a
lot of the original plant complexes which went ore->steel, but I don't
know that we need them with all the recycling. Also minimills near
your location are cheaper than central plants shipping material.
This is a bit away from computers, but not so much if you also look at
how things are moving around these days with IC and hardware production.
We are well into the 10 year old rule covering a lot of equipment
which is highly integrated, and not something you get that has general
purpose parts. I'm not even sure where we are going with things in
the last 10 years all starting to either be small equipment, and
larger systems being destroyed by the owners due to IP concerns and
other reasons.
as things have evolved all manner of things are now pretty caught up
being commodities and subject to being moved around the world.
jim