Logo
Prev
Bookmark
Rotate
Print
Next
Contents
All Pages
Related Articles
Browse Issues
Help
Search
Home
'
National Geographic : 1960 Apr
Contents
more children under school age than in all the 12 grades put together," one farm wife told me. Growing cities and new industries lure young professional people. Median age in Richland, the "Atomic City," is 26.6. Seattle's energetic Mayor Gordon S. Clinton was elected at 35. U. S. Senator Henry M. Jackson was first elected to Congress in 1940 at the age of 28. On the other hand, the average citizen of Ryderwood must be nearly 70. Ryderwood, a logging town that ran out of logs, seemed destined for ghost-township-until an enter prising realtor made it a haven for retired folk. They have come from all over the coun try, to hunt, fish in their own lake, work on houses and gardens, and kick up their heels at Saturday night dances. I watched Ryderwood's gray-headed young sters at work and play, then moved on to Vancouver to learn more about that youthful gray metal, aluminum, basic raw material for Washington State's aircraft industry. Dies Treat Aluminum Like Toothpaste World War II brought the aluminum indus try to Washington, where new generators at Bonneville and Grand Coulee could furnish the enormous power that smelters and roll ing mills demand. Plants at Vancouver, Long view, Tacoma, Spokane, and Troutdale in Oregon, produced aluminum for U. S. planes in World War II. The Korean War brought further expansion and a new smelter at We natchee. Today Washington still leads the Nation in aluminum production capacity. At the Alcoa plant along the Columbia River at Vancouver, I peered into huge elec trolytic cells that convert powdery alumina into glowing metal. I saw the metal cast into pigs and ingots. In the extrusion mill ingots of aluminum were squeezed through dies like toothpaste from a tube, emerging as stock for door and window frames, molding-an infinite variety of useful shapes. In an adjoining mill six-foot, 245-pound ingots were rolled and drawn into 18,000 feet of wire ~ of an inch thick. Other machines strand the wire over a steel core to make high tension transmission lines (page 463). Here was a complete circle! Columbia River power runs the aluminum plants that produce the cable that transmits the river's power. It sounded almost like perpetual mo tion. Then I heard the portentous words "interruptible power" and "brownouts." Power shortages in the Columbia Basin, possessor of two-fifths of the Nation's entire hydroelectric potential, where Grand Coulee is power personified? I had stood on the shores of Columbia Lake - where the -Columbia River begins amid the Rocky Mountains in British Columbia. By light plane and car I had traced its deep walled loops through the lavas of eastern Washington and followed it west along the boundary with Oregon. In the Columbia Gorge I saw where the majestic river, having marshaled the strength of many tributaries, at last burst the Cascades barrier to the sea. No longer is the Columbia a wilderness highway for trappers. Gone are the falls where Indians scooped salmon. Gone the solitudes "Where rolls the Oregon, and hears no sound, save his own dashings," imagined by William Cullen Bryant in his poem Thanatopsis. Instead I saw a harnessed giant, blocked by dams, pouring its energy into turbines, its water into irrigation canals, piling up into lakes to carry tugs and barges. High-tension towers carried the Columbia's electrical en ergy to industry's machines. Today the river is a powerhouse. It drops 2,650 feet from source to sea-the height of 16 Niagaras. Draining more than a quarter of a million square miles, the Columbia system each year builds up potential energy equal to two million tank cars of fuel oil. Surely North America's most powerful river must have power to spare. But in Olympia Earl Coe, Director of Wash ington's Department of Conservation and De velopment, brought me up to date. "When Bonneville and Grand Coulee were built back in depression days, people asked who'd use all that hydro power," Coe said. "Now we can't build dams fast enough." Power Lies Locked in Glaciers When the aluminum industry came to Washington, it drew others, attracted by the Nation's lowest power rates. Biggest con sumer of all is the atomic plant at Hanford, where plutonium is made from uranium. Han ford's eight production reactors use as much electricity as Washington, D. C. Coe picked up a pencil and shaded be tween two parallel lines. "This is firm power, the kind that lets you turn on your lights any time." He drew a curved line above. "This is the Columbia system's great summer flow from snow and glacier melt in the mountains. "We vitally need storage dams to harvest this water, not only for power, but for such other purposes as flood control. But high, 457
Links
Archive
1960 May
1960 Mar
Navigation
Previous Page
Next Page