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A comment on Micron Kicks Off Mass Production of 12 Gb DRAM Chips. Parent comment

Re:Micron Kicks Off Mass Production of 12 Gb DRAM Chips by hinkley on Thursday November 08, 2018 @12:43PM (#18408100)
Yeah that’s a good question. Smelters don’t generate their own power generally, right? But I believe they also use a lot of air cooling so most of that draw is going to be electrolysis.

Wikipedia has a list of aluminum smelters and I notice none of the biggest are in the US. Is that just because, or due to code limitations?

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Re:Micron Kicks Off Mass Production of 12 Gb DRAM Chips by oasisbob on Thursday November 08, 2018 @01:43PM (#18408723)
The Pacific Northwest used to have a lot more Aluminum smelting than it does now - the power was provided by large hydro power contracts.

Not sure if it was changes in these contracts or other market forces that caused the decline.

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Re:Micron Kicks Off Mass Production of 12 Gb DRAM Chips by oasisbob on Thursday November 08, 2018 @11:01PM (#18412245)
Decided to answer my own question - here's a great history of the NW aluminum industry:

https://www.nwcouncil.org/reports/columbia-river-history/alu...

The last active NW aluminum smelters closed in 2016. Most of the rest were victims of Enron and the 2000 energy crisis.

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Re:Micron Kicks Off Mass Production of 12 Gb DRAM Chips by mikeyouse on Thursday November 08, 2018 @02:16PM (#18409027)
Aluminum smelting is dirty and uses a ton of power -- we generally don't subsidize power here (in stark contrast to China / Argentina / etc.) and have increasingly strict environmental controls so we're offshoring most production and pollution associated with smelting from ore. We do have a lot of 'secondary' production which is much cleaner since it uses aluminum scrap as the input.
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