Everything modern that you know in your life from electricity, computers, home appliances, cars and even the gentle bicycle comes from and relies on these kinds of processes. When I visited there were more structures still there, as well as a huge debris field from a giant collapsed smoke stack which was also really strange to walk on and crawl over.
I can also note that they've done a whole lot of work cleaning it up. You can still see some of the concrete structures of the smelter scattered around, and they're huuuuge and were filled with bright green copper-tinged rainwater. This was the smelter that was fed by the Jerome copper mines right up the mountain from Clarkedale. You can see this slag pile on Google Maps near Clarkedale or Cottonwood, Arizona. I remember trying to kneel or sit on it to take photos and even when being careful I ended up with small cuts and scrapes just touching it with anything but my shoes, which also got chewed up pretty good. You really wouldn't want to trip or take a tumble on it because it's basically as sharp as a mountain of broken glass. Imagine something like 5-10 acres wide and a hundred feet tall or more of layered glass and molten stone with all of the sharpness of obsidian. But the slag pile - a mountain really - was something else entirely, and except for the breathable atmosphere it's more forbidding than a moonscape. Speaking of slag piles, I once explored an abandoned copper smelter. Hot slag is basically man made lava because it's the waste minerals, oxides and residual metals left over after smelting. Here is a compilation of slag pot dumps, including some accidents and explosions. And the mill workers need to clean that stuff up while it's hot because the longer it's left the more damage it's going to do and/or weld itself to expensive mill equipment. It's not like molten or red hot metal weighs any less than cold metal, and suddenly you have red hot danger noodles flying everywhere. Here is a small compilation of hot rolling steel mill "cobbles" selected more or less at random and there are hundreds of videos like this on YouTube. Granted this is the same industry that casually uses or used sticks of dynamite to tap (open) the plugs on a furnace or crucible, or pumping pure oxygen and/or air into a furnace at hypersonic speeds in the appropriately named blast furnace.
Which means if they spring a leak or burn through you end up with water and steam blasting into the charge and causing steam explosions. They basically make EAF crucibles and lids entirely out of pipes and run water through them. What if we took the concept of arc-welding metal but instead of little sticks for electrodes and maybe 50 to 100 amps, let's make the electrodes the size of tree trunks and we just ran ALL OF THE AMPS through it?"Īnd I'm trying to find this one good picture of the cooling pipes and structures of an EAF and I can't seem to find it, but if you take a look at this google image result you'll see a bunch of examples of how they keep an EAF from immediately melting along with the working charge.
I imagine the thought process went something like "Hey, these coal or gas fired smelters are a huge pain in the ass. I don't know who first thought of the concept of an EAF but they must have been a special kind of maniac. Those electrodes are gigantic and just about as big around as an adult human and maybe twice as tall. Here is an electric arc furnace operating normally and it's still utterly terrifying. Here's a steel mill exploding due to a "wet charge" which is what happens when there's too much water and moisture in a load of scrap steel. I can barely imagine what it's like to be in the same building as a steel mill or aluminum smelter, an electric arc furnace or a hot roll/strip mill even when everything is ok and operating normally.Īnd I've watched I don't know how many hundreds of hours of video about these kinds of plants including when everything is fine or when things have gone pear-shaped.
#THAT ESCALATED QUICKLY FULL#
Which is why you're supposed to pre-heat casting molds with a torch to dry them out, and you better be wearing full PPE if things go wrong. Just casting small ingots of aluminum or copper on a bench top in small crucibles or molds can result in steam flash explosions that send hot, molten metal all over a shed or garage. I've done some really small scale hot metal work like jewelry casting or melting aluminum and hot, liquid metal is terrifying even on small scales.
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