The other night I had a tour of a steel mill in the town I’m in and got to see a lot of processes of the mill, but one thing that I managed to take a video of was a slag dump. Slag is the ‘crust’ of the molten steel left over after the good steel has been poured into the molds — slag is the leftover junk material. It is simply dumped in a field and allowed to cool and harden and then is broken up with a crane ball into small pieces and used for things like land reclaimation and road bases. Hardened, it has a very pourous structure and can be sharp as broken glass, so you have to be careful if you walk on it or touch it.
The slag is in a large crucible carried by a wide, four-wheeled tractor-like machine that carts it from the casting building to the slag field, backs up to a new area, and then tips the pot to dump the slag. The following video shows this happening; you will note the vertical lines in the video as the extremely bright light overwhelms the video pickup in the camera.
Slag Dump Video (Quicktime format, 3.4MB)
