ALUMINUM: Nothing Doing

This is the sixth week since the Senate Defense Committee gave OPM a thorough dressing down for failing to anticipate the nation’s aluminum shortage (TIME, July 7). But at week’s beginning OPM still sat on the problem, hatching nothing.

Before the Senate’s clamor had died down, OPM announced a 600,000,000-lb. ( 75% ) expansion, with Government financing. Last month it “recommended” five companies to operate the plants. But this week officials of at least one company still knew nothing about the program except what they had read in newspapers, still had seen no contract. Not one piece of equipment for the new plants had been ordered, not one commitment for electricity had been made.

One “recommended” company was Olin Corp., which long has badgered OPM for approval of its plans to make aluminum by a new process using alunite instead of bauxite (TIME, June 16). The Bureau of Mines has approved the alunite process; so has OPM’s staff of technical experts. But OPM’s light-metal bigwigs, without having committed themselves either way, frown on alunite, want Olin Corp. to use bauxite instead.