See my post about about the Aluminum industry in American being crushed by the Chinese, they're known polluters and having all of the Aluminum smelting in China now is not a good thing. So yeah I agree "Just because it's not here doesn't mean it doesn't exist."
Not sure what you mean by 'we moved steel production'. Am a retired process control / network server admin for a global or rather used to be huge Aluminum company. A few years ago there were around 30 aluminum smelters in this country. For various reasons , a transfer of French Aluminum smelting technology and very bad trade laws, the Chinese dumped aluminum on the market and drove everyone else out of business. The built around a thousand new smelters....a thousand. A typical smelter uses around 325,000 amps of electrical current to drive the smelting pots in their potlines with a bill of around eleven million dollars a month, 24 hours a day. This might have something to do with the lower demand of electricity this post is talking about. But Thousands of very skilled specialized jobs and a huge knowledge base for making Aluminum was lost, most likely forever. This is not good guys.
We tried very hard to get the current political administration (obama's crew) back then to pay attention to what was happening but it was just crickets. No response from those guys at at all. And a key difference between the American smelters and the Chinese smelters is that we took environmental concerns very seriously. The gases were scrubbed and any waste was handled properly and disposed of properly, I doubt the Chinese smelters are doing this. Just another reason to keep smelters in the states or some other country where the environment is valued. So now we are dependent on the Chinese for Aluminum, they have questionable environmental controls and so pump gases and waste in to the air and an entire technology that Americans pioneered has been lost.
Slashdot Mirror
See my post about about the Aluminum industry in American being crushed by the Chinese, they're known polluters and having all of the Aluminum smelting in China now is not a good thing. So yeah I agree "Just because it's not here doesn't mean it doesn't exist."
Not sure what you mean by 'we moved steel production'. Am a retired process control / network server admin for a global or rather used to be huge Aluminum company. A few years ago there were around 30 aluminum smelters in this country. For various reasons , a transfer of French Aluminum smelting technology and very bad trade laws, the Chinese dumped aluminum on the market and drove everyone else out of business. The built around a thousand new smelters....a thousand. A typical smelter uses around 325,000 amps of electrical current to drive the smelting pots in their potlines with a bill of around eleven million dollars a month, 24 hours a day. This might have something to do with the lower demand of electricity this post is talking about. But Thousands of very skilled specialized jobs and a huge knowledge base for making Aluminum was lost, most likely forever. This is not good guys. We tried very hard to get the current political administration (obama's crew) back then to pay attention to what was happening but it was just crickets. No response from those guys at at all. And a key difference between the American smelters and the Chinese smelters is that we took environmental concerns very seriously. The gases were scrubbed and any waste was handled properly and disposed of properly, I doubt the Chinese smelters are doing this. Just another reason to keep smelters in the states or some other country where the environment is valued. So now we are dependent on the Chinese for Aluminum, they have questionable environmental controls and so pump gases and waste in to the air and an entire technology that Americans pioneered has been lost.