A GIANT consuming unbelievable quantities of food day after day, hour after hour​—that well describes an aluminum smelter. Its meat is the primary ore of aluminum, bauxite, or its by-product, alumina. Whichever one, there must be a constant supply flowing through, and at the same time vast quantities of electric power must be available. To establish a smelter area, then, there must be a major source of electric power and also a good port close by.

Would a location with these facilities be suitable near some large city? No, because other consumers would be making large demands on the power source. An aluminum smelter must have practically exclusive use of the power supply. This is why the aluminum industry is usually a pioneer of frontier country.

To a large extent, the determining factors for choosing a smelter site are geography and a climate with sufficient precipitation to ensure a steady volume of water. Norway’s only aluminum smelter takes advantage of power generated by water dropping 2,735 feet from the surrounding mountains.

In Ghana, the Volta River has been dammed by a hydroelectric generating station to supply an aluminum smelter and a plant for processing one of the world’s largest deposits of bauxite into alumina. The mountainous region of Minas Gerais state in Brazil at Curo Preto has three modern hydroelectric plants supplying a smelter that obtains its bauxite only one kilometer distant from the operation.

Fifty years ago at Shawinigan Falls, Quebec, the industry installed a large generating plant and smelter in the back country of the St. Maurice River valley, one hundred miles west of Quebec city. A few years later, north of that city a power plant and smelter were constructed on the Saguenay River at Isle Maligne. Shortly afterward Arvida, a few miles east on the same river, saw the beginnings of the world’s largest aluminum smelter​—one that opened to industry the once-closed country of the Saguenay. Now on Canada’s west coast, part of the hinterland of British Columbia has been opened up by the Kitimat smelter installations of the Aluminum Company of Canada.

The Kenney Dam

A constant downward flow of water was required to produce the power for the smelter. That meant impounding the waters of all the lakes of a plateau some 130 miles long. Up to November 1952, those waters flowed east to join the Fraser River system in its passage to the Pacific near Vancouver. At the western end of the plateau Tahtsa Lake was prevented from spilling its waters into the Pacific, only twenty miles away, by the solid rock barrier of 7,000-foot Mount Dubose. In order to form a reservoir of sufficient volume to serve the power plant that was envisioned, a 325-foot-high dam was needed to block the eastern outlet of the plateau, the Nechako River. Hence the Kenney Dam came into being.

Before work on the dam could get going, a 60-mile access road from Vanderhoof rail station had to be built through muskeg and bush as well as 45 miles of material supply roads. A 3,000-foot runway was also provided for ferrying men and material from Vancouver, three hours away by air. The dam, at completion, was 1,500 feet long, 1,500 feet wide at its base and tapering to forty feet at its crest. It became the third-highest rock-fill dam in the world.

Five years later there were five and a half cubic miles more water in the basin than before the dam was built. But now this water had to be made to fall a half mile from the west end of Tahtsa Lake to the powerhouse level on the Kemano River ten miles farther west. A waterfall was needed.

Waterfall Inside a Mountain

How was that achieved? Well, while the Kenney Dam was still being prepared, work also began on Mount Dubose. A ten-mile tunnel was dug into the face of the mountain from the west end of Tahtsa Lake. Its diameter was twenty-five feet. At the same time two 17-foot-diameter tunnels were drilled and blasted from the powerhouse level upward at an angle of 48° to meet the west end of the tunnel in the heart of Mount Dubose. Inside these tunnels sections of steel pipe, 28 feet long and having a diameter of 11 feet, were welded together to form the conduits, both 2,600 feet long. Broken rock and concrete were introduced around the outside of these conduits to hold them firmly in place.

Each penstock or conduit led to a manifold with four five-foot-diameter branches leading to the waterwheels of the generators. Tailrace tunnels from each generator were drilled and blasted out beneath the powerhouse floor, and these finally joined the 27-foot-wide main tailrace tunnel that discharges the spent water into the Kemano River and thence to the Pacific.

Thus waters that once flowed to the east now flow west to operate what is planned to be one of the largest privately owned power plants on the continent. The resultant waterfall within the mountain is, in fact, some sixteen times the height of Niagara Falls.