Go Inside an American Steel Mill

  • Nucor's Crawfordsville, Ind. steel mill. In this facility, scrap metal—old automobiles, appliances and construction parts—is melted, cast into slabs, and eventually rolled into large toilet paper-shaped coils of finished steel. The steel will soon be made into anything from industrial oil pipes to cars to buildings, Crawfordsville, Ind. on Aug. 25, 2014.
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  • Sparks shower out of steelmaking equipment, Crawfordsville, Ind. on Aug. 25, 2014.
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  • A Nucor steelworker monitors the furnace from inside a control room in the mill's melt shop, where scrap is liquified, Crawfordsville, Ind. on Aug. 25, 2014.
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  • Nucor melts scrap at close to 3,000 degrees Fahrenheit in furnaces like this one, Crawfordsville, Ind. on Aug. 25, 2014.
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  • A worker watches over operations in the mill, Crawfordsville, Ind. on Aug. 25, 2014.
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  • Steel slabs are prepared in this chamber before they are thinned into long sheets, Crawfordsville, Ind. on Aug. 25, 2014.
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  • Russell Barker works the control room of the mill's melt shop, Crawfordsville, Ind. on Aug. 25, 2014.
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  • Masks protect workers from the intense heat of the furnace, Crawfordsville, Ind. on Aug. 25, 2014.
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  • Steel is lifted into the air for processing, Crawfordsville, Ind. on Aug. 25, 2014.
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  • Slag, or molten runoff, is disposed of in the melt shop, Crawfordsville, Ind. on Aug. 25, 2014.
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  • A worker approaches the electric-arc furnace, which uses three giant electrodes to melt scrap into molten steel. Nucor's workers are among the highest-paid in the industry, Crawfordsville, Ind. on Aug. 25, 2014.
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  • An open ladle with over 100 tons of molten steel is lifted in the center of the mill, Crawfordsville, Ind. on Aug. 25, 2014.
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  • When there's a mechanical failure at the mill, it's all hands on deck, says 45-year-old Alan Fagan, pictured here. "When you lose containment" in the ladle carrying molten steel, "the shell pops open and it squirts steel everywhere," Fagan says. "Everyone dives in and helps each other," Crawfordsville, Ind. on Aug. 25, 2014.
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  • In the rolling mill, two-inch thick, red-hot slabs of steel are rapidly pounded into sheets thinner than cardboard, Crawfordsville, Ind. on Aug. 25, 2014.
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  • Rolling mill technician Mike Hutchinson oversees the steel's thinning process. "Our machines got ump," he says, Crawfordsville, Ind. on Aug. 25, 2014.
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  • American flags are found throughout Nucor's mills. "The American worker will outcompete anyone in the world," says CEO John Ferriola. "That’s why we’re an American company," Crawfordsville, Ind. on Aug. 25, 2014.
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By TIME Photo and Sam Frizell

Cheap natural gas is giving manufacturer Nucor a shot at reversing the long decline in American steelmaking

On the day after christmas 2013, John Ferriola received a FedEx package containing a dozen metal pellets, each about the size of a blueberry and the color of charcoal. They had been refined with natural gas at a temperature one fifth that of the surface of the sun. To most, the contents of the box would have looked like a heap of rubbish. To Ferriola, CEO of Nucor Corp., the tiny pellets represent a huge bet for the biggest steelmaker left in the U.S.

The technology may also help rekindle American steel manufacturing. Nearly a third of U.S. steelmaking jobs have disappeared over the past 15 years as the industry has boomed in China and other emerging economies. The lone …

Read the full story here

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