Amazing Chinese forging video

Dec 27, 2016 43 Replies
E

Yeah, everything about primary steel mills is gobsmacking. It reminds me of the feeling I got, as a lifelong Easterner/Midwesterner, seeing the Arizon a desert for the first time. The scale of everything was beyond my imaginat ion and it actually was disorienting. My sense of distance and depth percep tion all but disappeared.

Watching them pour a heat of steel was similar. I'd watch it, and then see some puny human walk into the field of view, and it was like being in a lan d of giants. This was before continuous casting had taken off in the US.

As for quenching coke, you'd see this large steel building out by itself. F rom a half-mile away you could see the heat rising, but there wasn't much e lse to give you a sense of scale. Then the water would come in on a huge ga ntry; they pour it in the top of the coking oven, and solid-looking black s moke poured out, straight up. IIRC, the dimensions of the column were somet hing like 100 feet square or more.

Then the black smoke would get picked up by the wind and blown east. The to p of the column bent over like the top of a thunderhead cloud.

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L

It shouldn't take that long to find out, Martin. The land will be tested before the next purchaser takes over. Oops!

- If ever the Time should come, when vain and aspiring

Men shall possess the highest Seats in Government,

our Country will stand in Need of its experienced

Patriots to prevent its Ruin. -- Samuel Adams

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M

Saw that done at Sydney, Nova Scotia, early 70s. Whole flaming rail car drenched, spectaular at night. A few years later, the mill closed and the "tar ponds" that collected the runoff became the province's biggest environmental nightmare.

AIUI, the health/mortality consequences of decades of coking in Sydney are still being litigated here.

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E

I find it strange that the health consequences of breathing carbon particul ates, which was recognized and a major issue back in the years of political activism for clean air, decades ago, had fallen off the radar again until fairly recently.

When I was a medical editor I saw frequent reports from Europe that identif ied the health risks presented by diesel automobiles. I remember one study that concluded that 11,000 people per year die prematurely in Europe from t hat cause alone.

In the meantime, the US had tighter particulate limits on diesel cars than Europe did, which is the main reason we still don't have many diesel cars i n the US. But we haven't made a big deal about it, otherwise. Stack scrubbe rs and other filters helped a lot with power plants and other big coal burn ers, but the push for diesel cars kept moving forward. The thought was that we could reduce the output to a "safe" level with advancing technology.

Now, it's widely recognized that diesels are killers, even with filtration. It appears that even small additions to the carbon particulates in the atm osphere results in more people dying. There apparently is no "safe" limit.

I think that diesels are about done in the US. And you and I probably are a mong the last generation to watch a major-scale open quenching of coke.

I hope that you're able to reach a clear conclusion about the health effect s people have suffered up there.

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