Nucor ultimately would pay nearly a quarter of a million dollars in fines to the EPA for building the steel mill without a permit. We may end up doing it for less than two hundred and sixty million. And if this facility was build by the government, I don't know what it would cost. A billion dollars, two billion. I don't know.
Steel rolling machines float on barges of concrete.
Most of a steel mills' mass is below ground and out of sight. The tops of the machines, which may rise several stories above the ground, are the tip of the iceberg. At the flip of a switch, Millett had added a city to the Indiana power grid. The furnace was tapping enormous amounts of electrical energy out of the state's power grid, reaching to within spitting distance of its maximum draws, and driving the energy at high voltage into seventy tons of broken steel, enlacing the pile with arcs of electricity. An arc furnace can produce electrical disturbances in a state's power grid, echoes or harmonics that back-ripple through the grid.