Wikimapia is a multilingual open-content collaborative map, where anyone can create place tags and share their knowledge.

Kaiser Aluminum Mead Works

USA / Washington / Country Homes /
 production, aluminum, smelter, environmental protection agency
 Upload a photo

EPA Superfund Site
www.epa.gov/superfund/sites/query/queryhtm/nplccl.htm#W...

Though often referred to as a smelter, this was actually a reduction plant. The process of converting alumina (aluminum oxide) into aluminum is known as reduction. It's an electrolytic process requiring large amounts of electrical current to separate the oxygen atom from the aluminum allowing it to combine with the carbon of the anode to form carbon dioxide. This plant had 8 potlines that ran in the neighborhood of 70,000 amps at 650 to 700 volts DC each.

Built in 1941 by the Defense Plant Corp. and operated by Alcoa. After WWII this plant was declared surplus and bought at a discount by Henry Kaiser in 1946 when Alcoa was prohibited from bidding to prevent a monopoly because Alcoa was already embroiled in an anti-trust action.

This reduction plant ran "pre-bake" rather than Soderberg pot-cells and was completely self-contained with multiple wells and a sewage treatment plant. The original electrical buss-work in the potrooms was silver. This was during the war years when copper was needed more elsewhere. The plant back then was heavily guarded by armed guards. Rumor was that when the silver was removed and replaced with copper, there was less than a pound difference in the amount taken out as compared to how much went in.

The Mead plant ran more or less for 54 years until the energy market shenanigans brought about by Enron. It was way more profitable to shutdown and sell on the market the large allotment of power from the BPA. Kaiser made somewhere around $500 million for this, but the BPA wasn't happy and when it came time to negotiate the next power contract, the BPA demanded market value for the power necessary to run the plant. Since there's no way to make money at reducing aluminum at market rate for power, Kaiser shut the plant permanently. It has since been bought by a salvager who's been selling off, salvaging and scrapping everything worth any money.
Nearby cities:
Coordinates:   47°45'18"N   117°22'40"W
This article was last modified 16 years ago