Construction Of New Plants Research Articles

The Steel Industry

In the early 1960s, American steel producers came under severe pressure from imported steel. Most of this steel came from Europe and Japan, where large new steelworks had been constructed. The appropriate economic response by the American producers to the “internationalization” of their home markets would have been technological modernization and an accelerated reform of their splintered plant structure. This would have required the closing of many marginal installations and, simultaneously, the construction of new plants. After several decades of decision making in a less competitive and hence more predictable economic environment, the managers of the large steel companies were unprepared to embrace a strategy ensuing in abrupt change and headlong innovation. Neither was the labor union ready to cooperate fully with management on the issue of work rules and productivity. Instead, both management and labor sought to buy time by means of political lobbying for protection. Although successful, this strategy cannot be considered a long-term solution to the import problem of the integrated steel producers. Steel is an important input for the large metal working sector, and trade measures that raise the cost of steel would impair the ability of many firms to compete in domestic and foreign markets.

Practical Management and Control Systems in the Steel Industry - A Case Study of KIIS (Kimitsu Integrated Information System): Case 2. Continual Improvement of KIIS Responding to the Expansion and Restructuring Needs of Kimitsu Works

The prototype of Kimitsu Integrated Information System (KIIS) was completed in 1970. Since then, this system has been playing an indispensable role in the production control of Kimitsu Works. During the high growth period which continued up to the oil crisis of 1973, the computer systems were expanded with the construction of new plants. After the oil crisis, however, restructuring and modification of the existing systems became necessary to adapt to changes in the economy and plant-operating conditions, and to meet changes in manufacturing processes. Against such background, computer applications have been further expanded to fit theapplication of on-line systems to administrative areas in addition to the area of production control, and new computer systems have been developed to facilitate the control and analysis by staff departments. In addition, efforts have been made to utilize computers to improve the efficiency of various operations and activities in the Computer System Planning Office.

The Role of Banks in the Finance of the West Yorkshire Wool Textile Industry, c. 1780–1850

The view of early British commercial banks as almost exclusive suppliers of short-term accommodation loans is further diminished by Dr. Hudson's intensive research in the surviving records of banks operating in the expanding wool manufacturing district of West Yorkshire from the turn of the century to the 1840s. By means primarily of the overdraft expedient, private banks and, after they were permitted by law, joint-stock banks, routinely made nominally short-term loans for such long-term capital purposes as construction of new plants and replacement of obsolete machinery. No laws and frequently little practical business acumen governed policies with respect to posting of collateral, holding of bank reserves against deposits, ratio of overdrafts to the borrower's level of profits, or even the special privileges granted stockholders and directors. It thus was not institutional rigidities that drove British investors to prefer overseas opportunities, Hudson theorizes, but the sheer excess of long-term capital sources, of which banks were an important one, in relation to opportunities to use them. Most striking, however, is the slowness with which old business habits gave way to new practices more appropriate to the maturing of a system of industrial finance.

The origin and direction of industrial R&D in India

This paper surveys the trends in industrial R&D in India over the last two decades. It shows that there has been a rapid rise in R&D expenditure and a shift in its composition towards in-house corporate R&D and away from R&D in government laboratories, which is explained by the laboratories' lack of market orientation and manufacturing experience. According to cross-section studies of corporate R&D, larger companies aim towards larger technological advances and take a longer view; but the overall composition of corporate R&D shows no discernible change. This apparent inconsistency is explained by the development of the technology market. Much R&D was triggered off by the need for import replacement arising from import controls till 1965 and later by the need for product diversification in the recession. But construction of new plants and mechanization for speeding up operations, activities where sustained R&D can yield large firms a steady flow of innovations, were unimportant or infrequent, and the demand for technology they gave rise to was largely met by imports.

Plutonium, Proliferation and the Price of Reprocessing

urope and the United States have parted company on the question of reprocessing spent fuel from nuclear power reactors, particularly as it applies to the separation and export of plutonium. The decisions to proceed with the construction of new plants at Windscale in Britain and La Hague in France, designed in large part to provide this service for non-nuclear-weapon countries, run counter to the U.S. conviction that restricting separation and trade in plutonium is essential, at least until more effective controls can be devised. History, unlike physics, does not allow for controlled experi ments, so we may know how things would have turned out had the British and French acceded to the American plea that a commitment to large-scale reprocessing be deferred. I do not propose here to rehash the arguments over whether these Euro pean decisions should have been taken. What I would like to do is to explore their implications for our common effort at control over the proliferation of nuclear weapons. There is no disagreement among the United States, Britain and France that reprocessing plants in non-nuclear-weapon states should be discouraged. The British Foreign Secretary, Dr. David Owen, told Parliament during the Windscale debate that Britain had never made such a sale, nor do we intend to do so. The recently reported mutual reexamination of a transaction involving the sale of reprocessing facilities by France to Pakistan is welcome news. There is disagreement among us, however, over whether provision of plutonium services for export helps the effort to contain proliferation. The situation is not without its ironies: much of the spent fuel the United States hopes will not be reprocessed prematurely is in

Safety in solvent extraction plants—USA

AbstractThe history of the National Fire Protection Association, Solvent Extraction Committee, is discussed with particular emphasis on the impact of the Occupational Safety and Health Act of 1971. A review of the important features standardized in NFPA No. 36, “Solvent Extraction Plants,” is discussed, with particular emphasis on their relevance to construction of new plants and expansion of existing plants.

Is the World Running Out of Raw Materials?*

T HE argument that the world is running out of raw materials has recently taken on a great deal of additional credibility. Oil prices have risen almost four-fold and many other commodities from wheat and sugar through to copper have also shown spectacular increases in price. In fact, the extent and ubiquity of the price increases in primary commodities has been unprecedented. One could almost say that never have so many commodities risen so far and so quickly in such a short time. There are several reasons for what has been happening, yet the proposition that the world is about to run out of raw materials is not one of them. As always in commodities, the reasons for the sharp movement in prices are due to factors on both the demand and supply sides. Had the price increases been due to resource depletion one would have expected the main factor on the supply side to have been the sheer limitation on increasing production beyond existing levels of capacity. But a closer look at the situation in most commodity markets will quickly reveal that production has not in fact been held back by an ultimate capacity constraint. On the contrary, the problems have been ones of disruption and dislocations in supply so that production has in many cases fallen well below potential capacity. This is true for agricultural commodities such as wheat, sugar and coffee where weather conditions have played havoc with the annual harvest or crop. Many metals have been hit by an unusual number of production disruptions due to strikes, political problems, as in Chile, or technical breakdowns at processing plants. This has been further aggravated by the introduction of stricter anti-pollution legislation as well as by one or two factors which have either forced the complete closure of processing plant pending the construction of new plant and equipment, or forced existing plant to operate at well below design capacities. Thus in zinc, for instance, around twenty per cent. of the non-socialist world smelting capacity has been closed down over the last three years. Even in the case of oil, where those who support the resource depletion argument can probably make out their strongest case, the price increases have also been associated with a substantial cutback in production.

Recent Changes in the Geographical Location of the British Steel Industry

Locational change takes a variety of forms. In manufacturing the simplest of these involves the construction of new plants and the abandonment of old ones. In a maturing economy the pace of this process declines as increasing economies of scale, and possibly the high capital cost of developing wholly new sites, point to the desirability of extending and modernizing existing works. The differential rates of growth of plants, centres of production or districts provides an alternative approach to the study. Related to this is an analysis of alterations in the patterns of regional specialization?in the present case, specialization on different products included under the omnibus title, finished steel. Consumption of these grows at widely vary? ing rates and a readiness to change the product line has been notably lacking in the modern British industry. Change in the structure of demand therefore has impor? tant locational consequences. A further aspect concerns patterns of movement?of minerals and finished products, or, at an in-between stage, the linkages in semifinished material or scrap between plants and districts. In order to provide a broad framework within which these categories of locational change may be traced the longest period included here under the adjective 'recent' is taken as that since the formulation of the industry's first postwar development plan in 1945. This longtime span is, however, chiefly employed as the backcloth to the locational planning and decision-taking of the midand late-1960^ from which-will proceed the broad outline of the geography of iron and steelmaking in Britain to the i98o,s and even beyond. The paper is concerned in the first place with the way in which the industry has responded to the changing balance of locational forces?the technology of process? ing, the type, source and transport of raw materials, and alterations in the structure and distribution of demand and the conditions of marketing. Secondly it attempts a value judgement based on this analysis. This may be summed up in the question: 'How adequate has the locational response been ? An outline ofthe background and pattern of locational change is followed by an examination of the relationship be? tween markets and location in recent years and of the modest alterations in tech? nique and raw materials through to 1958. The sweeping changes in technology and raw material supply in the last ten years suggest new locational choices and receive fuller attention.

Industrial Water Requirements

Industrial water use accounts for almost half of the water withdrawn in the U.S., excluding hydroelectric power. Availability of process water continues to be one of the main reasons for construction of new plants along inland waterways, with about 40 per cent of the new plants being in the chemical and petroleum industries, whose water requirements for washing and cooling are very large. The article discusses the management of industrial water requirements, with emphasis on water reuse, use of sewage effluents, and plant location where abundant water resources are available.

CEMENT PLANT LOCATION IN JAPAN

Some studies on cement plant location in Japan were conducted by geograhers and economists. But those were on the basis of the Weberian location theory, which assumes markets to be perfect, one price ruling throughout each of them. Or, otherwise expressed, transport costs and other costs involved in movement within a market are assumed to be zero, and the market treated as one-point. In the early years of the cement industry, when the uses for the portland cement were limited to some large cities, these analyses were adequate and correct. As the demand increased and expanded, the networks of supply areas have stretched and extended over almost the entire country of Japan. Weberian theory has not been sufficient to determine the location of cement plants. Losch's theory is a pioneering first attempt to determine the spatial arrangemet of economic activity. This provides a set of equations displaying the location system. This also asks what the distribution of a producing place will be under postulation of continuous demand on a homogeneous plain. That answer can be achieved by analyzing the possible shapes, and possible sizes of market-areas. In this paper the location of the recent cement plants in Japan will be analyzed basically on the ground of the analysis of market-areas. 1) The first cement plant in Japan was constructed at Fukagawa, Tokyo in 1892. In the beginning this plant was managed directly by the government, but later it was sold to a private concern, the original of the present Nihon Cement Co. LTD. Every cement plant that has been established since then, has been controlled by a private concern. But the cement plant location was not determind through economic consideration until about 1887. After that time most cement plants work their own quarries and have been found to be established in certain localities especially selected for their proximity to rich limestone and coal deposits which constitute the chief raw material and a large part of production co st for cement manufacturing. Hence one third of all 47 cements have concentrated in the northern part of Kyushu which abounds in rich deposits of limestone and coal. 2) As the Japaese cement industry progressed, the 3 main companies, namely Nihon, Onoda and Iwakicement industry Co. LTD. have monopolized the cement production. These three companies are operating 26 plants and their production amounts to 48 percent of the overall total. 3) The change of the maritime transportation situation, the improduction facilties and engineering technique in the cement industry, and the extension of the cement demand over the regional areas of the country have brought about a great change in locational conditions for the industry. That is, since many Japanese ships were damaged during the Pacific War, the cost of maritime transportaion has become so high compared with land carriage. The adaptation of long economical kilns, Lepol kilns and air quenching coolers have brought down the unit consumption of coal. Whereas heretofore the major consumers of cement were the urban areas, the present situation is that the regional areas embracing the farms and mountains are also becoming big consumers and the difference in the volume of consumption between them is gradually dwindling. In prewar days the selection of sites for the erection of cement plants was made chiefly on their proximity to raw material sources which did not always correspond to the areas of actual consumption and distribution. After the War, however, the construction of new plants (11 plants after the War) and expansion work are attracted to the market-areas which are rather closely connected with the raw material sources, and have a tendency of dispersion. Except from the spatial aspect of monopolitic competition, such the dispersion of cement plants is thus no longer comprehensive.

Financing Chemical Expansion

IN the seven postwar years from 1946 to 1952, the chemical industry has grown tremendously. Since even the experts have difficulty in agreeing on the companies that should be included in figures on the chemical industry, I shall limit my discussion to the six largest—Du Pont, Union Carbide, Allied, Dow, American Cyanamid, and Monsanto. All figures are for calendar years except Dow whose figures are for fiscal years ending May 31. For these six companies, sales more than doubled from $1740 million in 1945 to $4091 million in 1952—an increase of $2351 million dollars. Du Pont alone had a sales increase of almost $1 billion. That was more than twice total sales at Dow this year. This sales increase was made possible by the construction of new plants at a rate far in excess of anything done in the past. Construction expenditures for the seven years totaled $2667 million, of which the individual totals were: ...

Development of Industrial Production in the U.S.S.R

THE special conditions under which industrial production takes place in the U.S.S.R. may be very briefly recapitulated. (i) The State owns the means of production. The State budget finances the capital construction of new plants. The of industrial undertakings go to the State. By redistributing these profits between different plants, and by State subsidisation, it is possible to continue production in uneconomic plants. (2) The State monopolises foreign trade. This completely prevents world prices from influencing internal prices. The Soviet rouble is not quoted on foreign stock exchanges and cannot be exported or imported. (3) All prices with the exception of those of the Kolkhoz market2 are fixed by the State planning organ. For many products the fixed prices exceed costs of production: the difference goes to the State budget in profit or turnover tax. For certain industrial goods, on the other hand, the price may be fixed even below cost and the loss covered by subsidy from the State budget.3 These special conditions are the cause at once of the positive and negative aspects of the development of industrial production in the U.S.S.R.