L. Patrick Hassey
Management
Let's start with the Exotic Alloys. I think that's a great question, John, and it is a trend. I think on the Exotic Alloys side when we look at the needs across the planet for nuclear energy. And it's not just the United States with the 10 reactors that are currently under consideration and maybe 42 in the next 15 years are going to happen in the U.S., but when we you go and look at the needs of the world, including China, including India, including Russia, the Middle East, there is a market that I have never had in my working career because as I got into the business, maybe as you have, too, the nuclear era was, if you want to call it this, misspeaking here, but basically ending, and it went into a maintenance mode for the next 35 years. Well, now there's a lot more people in the world, there's a lot more need for electricity, and if we ever plug in cars, it's going to be very interesting on how much more is needed. There's a move to nuclear as part of this whole mix. Besides being green, besides the alternative energy, wind energy and the rest, nuclear becomes a major part in the replacement of carbon fuel. There is a definite trend on the High Performance Metals side for zirconium or hafnium for the nuclear metals and that goes all the way from reactors to refueling to building new stations to the exchangers and all that go into the specialty nickel-based alloys. It's a very big move that I think will be a big part of ATI in the future. Now answering your questions around flat-rolled, the volume increases would have come in flat-rolled titanium products. Again, we shipped over 3 million pounds of titanium flat-rolled products in the first quarter, so putting that together, it's 1 million pounds a month of titanium that's coming out of the Flat-Rolled business that, it's not very good English, but didn't used to be there, right? Also, we've made some inroads in some specialty steels. We've made some inroads in the aerospace business; that has some specialty steels in it. And we are now venturing into the defense markets, so that mix is on a higher value plane. I think if I would step back and look at that business today I would say electrical steel is back at 25,000 tons, 27,000 tons first quarter, a very good quarter for us in electrical steel. The plate business is building. We're increasing our capabilities on the nickel-based alloy and titanium. That makes up the difference from what the business used to be.