IRON AND STEEL IN 1956

(Frorr~: the Data of the Central Statistical Bureau of the Council of Ministers USSR).

The undertakings of the Ministry of Iron and Steel USSR fulfilled the annual plan for 1956 to 99.6%. The output of pig-iron was 35.8 million tons (10~1o of the 1955 figure), steel 48.6 million tons (10W0 of the 1955 figure), rolled steel 37.8 million tons (107~ of 1955),steel tubes 3.8 million tons (108% of 1955) and iron-ore 78 miUion tons (109~ of 1955).

An important condition of increasing industrial production in 1956 was the further improvement of manu- facturing technology and the utilization of existing means of production. 1In the plants of the Ministry of Iron and Steel USSR the utilization of the useful volume of blast furnaces improved in 1956 by 3~o over 1955, while the steel output per square meter of furnace hearth also rose by 3~ At the same time the existing reserves at the plant~ nf the Ministry for increasing the production of ferrous metals were inadequately employed. Throughout the Ministry as a whole the assignments for 1956 for the utilization of blast furnaces and open-hearth furnaces were not fulfilled. There was a considerable short-fall also in the plan for lowering the cost of production.

Further work was carried out in iron and steel manufacture in the introduction of new techniques, the use of oxygen for steel smelting in open-hearth and electric steel smelting furnace~, in converter production and in the smelting of blast furnace ferrous alloys, the use of heat resisting refractories, the establishment of the process of continuous steel casting and the employment of vacuum in metal casting, together with automatic control of the production processes. At the same time the Ministry of Iron and Steel USSR did not achieve fulfillment of the assignments for the introduction of oxygen plants,automatic control of roiling mills and mechanized grading of iron and manganese ore and rock in quarry driving.

In 1956 large blast-furnaces were brought into operation at the Dneprodzerzhinsky and the Stalin works, in addition to itwo open-hearth furnaces with a capacity of 400 thousand tons of metal per year at the Voroshilovgrad steel plant. At the same plant there was built a new blast furnace which was tapped for the first time in the early days of January, 1957. A plant was brought into operation for the production of cold-rolled sheet at the Magnitogorsk works. However, during the past year the plan for bringing into 9pemtion further productive capacities was ~underfulfilled. Six roiling mills, one blast furnace and two open-hearth furnaces, together with two Bessemer converters, all specified intheplan, were not commissioned.

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