MINERAL ORES AND WATER POWER 



age of light metals needed for fifty thousand warplanes 

 became a surplus production demanding cut-backs in 

 1944. The South has the capacity to produce a million 

 tons of aluminum and three hundred thousand tons of 

 magnesium; a greater output of both than existed in 

 the whole country prewar. 



The biggest magnesium plant in the world that of 

 the Dow Chemical Company at the mouth of the Brazos 

 River in Texas taps the infinitesimal but infinite supply 

 of magnesium in the ocean. Headquarters of aluminum 

 production in the United States Alcoa in Tennessee 

 and Reynolds in Alabama are at the geographical 

 center of the country's bauxite supply. Threatened by 

 voracious war demands, that supply has been multi- 

 plied many fold by a new lime-soda treatment that 

 extracts high-grade raw material out of low-grade ores 

 formerly considered useless. At Listerhill and Hurricane 

 Creek, Alabama, at Baton Rouge and Mobile, are four 

 big, new, war-built plants to produce alumina: not 

 aluminum, but the processed raw material from which 

 both the metal and the alum are made. Another alumina 

 plant at Harleysville, South Carolina, is a wartime ex- 

 periment in coaxing this valuable aluminum oxide out 

 of clay, a source that rivals the ocean. There is little 

 worry now that we shall run short of either of these 

 metals. 



Quite the reverse worry arises where are we going 

 to put all the lightweight metal we have on hand? Im- 



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