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Comment by MisterTea | Hacker News Reader

As someone who grew up in a machine shop, still in manufacturing, and have my own hobby shop, its gross how much raw materials cost. I can get finished parts shipped from China cheaper then I can buy the raw material here in the US. I almost wept looking at over $500 for a simple 2x4 foot sheet of 1/2 inch thick 6061 aluminum.

Inconel is through the roof and I know a few aerospace clients who are MONTHS behind due to shortages and bonkers material costs. Like holding up the military supply chain which is ludicrous. This admin is brain dead.

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It is going to get worse. Iron/steel and aluminum are some of the most common elements on the planet. They are literally everywhere. The cost is in the energy for production, and to a lesser extent transport. But energy is not only going to become more expensive but actually hard to get (thank you again AI). Canada has energy, from empty land for wind/solar/hydro, to oil, to enormous piles of uranium ore. That is not an enemy worth making.

I remember people taking about smelting aluminum as a way to put overproduced solar electricity to a good use. Would come in very handy now.

It would, but smelting is not a process that likes being started and stopped. Once furnaces and other bits and pieces are up to temperature they want to stay there. Thermal expansion is a thing, but also letting them all cool down is throwing energy away. And iron workers don't like sitting around "on call" waiting for energy prices to swing enough to justify going to work.

Same too with customers. The people buying bulk metal need is when they need it. They don't want to wait around, literally, for the winds to change.

Aluminium smelting is an electrochemistry process.

Can you expand on what relevance this has to the pragmatic thermal process based point raised in the comment above yours?

The aluminium smelters I've had contact with have all avoided any shutdowns (back up generators, etc) because any significant breakdown in continuous processing involves several days of tear down in order to restart.

I am literally within 20 feet of someone who worked 5 years as a general foreman in charge of the smelter portion of the Portland aluminium smelter* who is not embracing the idea that this a process you can just turn off and turn on again later w/out a large chunk of effort.

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Portland_aluminium_smelter

The relevance is that you would have a base load to keep the system hot which is separate from the electricity that does the work.

I think at a steel smelter, since the heat does the work, they aren't as easily separable. You would still use less energy at the times when you processed less metal.

Aluminium smelters were traditionally some of the biggest loads on the grid. They were built near hydroelectric dams and had contracts with electricity providers to absorb excess energy and to pause operations on short notice when other demand is high. In exchange for this they get it very cheap, which is good because they need a lot of it. Variable energy supply is not new to them.

Now I've never worked at either and I'm just spitballing ideas on the internet, but you haven't either and you are too.

If only there was a way to replace a BOF or arc furnace with Nvidia Blackwells.

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