Kaiser Steel

Kaiser Steel was a steel company and integrated steel mill near Fontana, California. Industrialist Henry J. Kaiser founded the company on December 1, 1941, and workers fired up the plant's first blast furnace, named "Big Bess" after Kaiser's wife, on December 30, 1942. Then in August 1943, the plant would produce its first steel plate for the Pacific Coast shipbuilding industry amid World War II.
Resources for early production came from various sources, and the Fontana site presented some logistical disadvantages. However, the plant continued to grow in capacity after the war, adding more furnaces and metal rollers while also introducing new processes. The company would also eventually develop its own mines and railroad so that the steel mill formed a node in Kaiser's larger, vertically-integrated business.
The Korean War led to another surge in production, and by the 1960s, Kaiser Steel and competitor Geneva Steel, a U.S. Steel-owned plant near Salt Lake City, Utah, had captured most of the Pacific Coast steel market. Starting in the late 1960s though, Japanese and Korean steelmakers would begin out-competing the mill; despite attempts to adapt, the company would enter a steady decline until the mill closed in December 1983. Since then, much of the land in Fontana was sold to create the Auto Club Speedway, while a small portion of the plant still performs rolling operations under different ownership as California Steel Industries.

Background

Prior to World War II, Henry J. Kaiser was already an established industrialist in construction, even participating in the Six Companies, the joint venture tasked with building Hoover Dam and other large infrastructure projects during the New Deal. Kaiser had also entered the shipbuilding business by 1940, focusing on merchant ships for the new United States Maritime Commission. As the war expanded, Kaiser would rapidly open several Kaiser Shipyards on the West Coast of the US, including four Richmond Shipyards located near San Francisco, California.
From the beginning, however, the time and cost of purchasing and shipping steel from the Eastern United States cut into the efficiency of the shipyards. Wartime demand and shortages only made reliance on the Eastern steel mills more painful. Aware of this and risks to shipping through the Panama Canal, US government planners supported rapidly standing up steel production near the West Coast.
Political and personal reasons may have piqued Kaiser's interest in a Californian steel mill too. Besides ambition and confidence in his own problem-solving abilities, Kaiser had cultivated ties to several influential members of the Franklin D. Roosevelt administration. He had also established close business ties with Californian financier Amadeo Giannini, and though originally from New York State, Kaiser had himself become a strong proponent for industrializing the Western US, with greater independence from established industries to the east.

Beginnings: 1941–1942

Planning and funding

In the spring of 1941, industry on the US Pacific Coast, including the Kaiser Shipyards and other shipbuilders, still relied on expensive steel from the Eastern US. Beyond the cost of rail transport across country, high even under normal circumstances, the distant steel companies typically charged a large markup for Western customers. Capacity itself had also become an issue. Although the US had not yet directly entered World War II, US rearmament and support for allies had pushed demand for finished steel beyond what the Eastern mills could produce. Rail infrastructure also limited shipments to the West Coast.
Though skeptical of expanding westward, this had led U.S. Steel to propose operating what would become the Geneva Steel plant in Utah. The company's only condition was that the government covered the plant's construction as a grant, arguing that the mill would likely become an uneconomical, stranded asset once the war ended and demand returned to peacetime levels. Kaiser, more optimistic about a western mill's long-term prospects and sensing an opportunity to outflank U.S. Steel, offered to build his own facility without any grants, just loans from the Reconstruction Finance Corporation.
Kaiser's initial plans from April 1941 were not necessarily for an integrated mill, but to refine steel ingots along with a finishing mill, forge, and foundry somewhere in the Los Angeles area. The primary input, less refined pig iron, would come from blast furnaces, possibly in a separate facility, which would source raw iron ore in turn from mines in Utah. This plan to produce finished steel in Los Angeles had several advantages: the tidewater location allowed for low-cost maritime transport, and electric power was cheap thanks to the hydroelectric plant at Hoover Dam. The area could also provide existing infrastructure and a large labor force.
Government planners did not respond enthusiastically at first, and Kaiser's proposal was delayed indefinitely, nominally because of doubts about sourcing raw materials. Throughout this time, Kaiser continued working on the proposal and formally incorporated the Kaiser Steel Corporation on December 1, 1941.
Following the attack on Pearl Harbor and direct US entry into World War II though, along with positive appraisals of Kaiser's existing factories, the US government switched its stance. Kaiser's proposal was fast-tracked and the RFC issued a loan of for construction of the mill, only with conditions.

Finding a site

The government's first condition was that the mill's initial size would be limited to wartime demand. The second, much more oppressive requirement was that the mill be sited at least inland, not in a tidewater area. The primary reason given for restricting the location was to limit the facility's vulnerability to a potential Japanese raid, but some such as writer and consultant A.G. Mezerik believed Eastern competitors had quietly lobbied for the requirement in order to handicap the facility's post-war potential.
Common wisdom in the steel industry was that a facility could not be profitable if more than one of the main links in its supply chain relied on ground transport. An integrated mill at Los Angeles would already be risky, with reliance on rail transport for regional ore and coal only partly mitigated by easy port access. A plant further inland would lose even the advantage of the port. Yet Kaiser typically embraced a business strategy heavy on innovation and superior operations management. Also forecasting rapid growth in the Western market after the war, he believed the plant could still compete despite an unfavorable site.
After surveying the area, the new steel company quickly settled on the town of Fontana in San Bernardino County for the mill. Just inland, it was about as close to the sea as the government's conditions allowed. Additionally, it had excellent railroad connections and an especially good water supply network for the region, including its own hydroelectric plant. Kaiser may have been drawn to the smaller, rural community too, both for sentimental reasons and a shrewd recognition that local government would likely be more compliant should any disputes with the company arise.

Up and running: 1942–1943

Construction

The first public notice of the coming mill would appear in the local Fontana newspaper on 6 March 1942. Less than a month later, by 3 April, the company would break ground on the new site. The project and construction continued progressing rapidly, fast enough in fact that by 30 December of that year, the plant's coke ovens were already in operation, and Henry J. Kaiser himself was given the honor of starting the blast furnace, named "Big Bess" in honor of his wife.

Starting equipment

More sections of the mill would come online through the following year. By 15 December 1943, the facility occupied of land and included the following property, plant, and equipment :

Item	Process step	Count	Batch size	Production
Ore storage	Mineral processing
Crushing and screening plant	Mineral processing
Ore bedding system	Mineral processing
Sinter plant	Mineral processing	1		493
Coke plant	Coking	90		340
Blast Furnace	Smelting	1	1,200 tons	388
Stationary open hearth furnaces	Steelmaking	5	185 tons	600
Tilting open hearth furnace	Steelmaking	1	185 tons	120
Electric arc furnace	Steelmaking	1	20 tons	30
Ingot mold foundry	Casting	1		28.8
Breakdown mill	Rough rolling	1	36 in.	420
Plate mill	Finish rolling	1	110 in.	300
Structural mill	Finish rolling	1	29 in.	210
Merchant bar mills	Finish rolling	3	21, 18, and 14 in.	180
Alloy finishing facilities	Finishing			24
Slow cooling pits	Annealing

Sourcing raw materials

The complete steelmaking process requires significant amounts of energy. Thankfully for the Fontana plant, hydroelectric plants at Hoover Dam and more locally at Lytle Creek could provide a baseline of cheap and reliable electric power.
However, as an integrated mill, the plant would need regular shipments of raw materials to produce pig iron, which would then be refined into steel. The first requirement would be the iron ore itself. On that count, Fontana's location provided an advantage; plentiful iron deposits existed throughout the nearby Mojave Desert, even in San Bernardino County. For initial production, Kaiser Steel quickly purchased an iron mine near Kelso, California outright. Known as the "Vulcan Mine", it would serve as the mill's primary source of ore until 1948.
The next requirement would be limestone or dolomite. Either rock can be ground down and added to a blast furnace as a metallurgical flux, maintaining an ideal chemistry in the furnace while also binding the ore's waste minerals into slag. This ingredient posed no problem for the Kaiser plant either, as both rocks available nearby from various quarries in California and Nevada.
The mill would require one more input though: abundant metallurgical coal, which would be converted to coke first, then added to the blast furnace. With no available deposits within Southern California, or even neighboring Arizona and Nevada, sourcing coal would be one of the plant's main challenges throughout its lifetime. At first, Kaiser Steel would be forced to look as far as Sunnyside, Utah, specifically Utah Fuel Company Mine No. 2, which Kaiser would lease entirely in 1943.
In combination, Kaiser Steel's logistical costs did not doom the plant to failure. Flux and iron ore were particularly economical, and versus competitors, the cost of transporting finished steel from Fontana to the California coast was insignificant. The mill's coal costs, however, would largely negate these advantages. With costlier coal than any other blast furnace in the US, the plant would have to excel operationally to survive in the market.