could nucor make low-priced steel with highly-paid american workers?s not what you pay an employee that's important. it's what he produces. if he produces a great deal, you can pay him a great deal. the average hourly worker in darlington, south carolina, in our steel mill had earnings last year of over $30,000 a year. we had melters who earned over $35,000, which compares reasonably with what unionized workers in the integrated mills earned last year. now, if you look at what we produce, though, that we produced last year some 850 tons per employee, where the average for the integrated producers was something like 350 tons per employee. nucor wasn't the only company using minimill techniques to turn red ink into black. dr. robert crandall, an economist with the brookings institution, a washington, d.c., think tank. in the steel industry, a minimill industry is growing up to replace the less efficient integrated firms. we're likely to have in the future 75 firms each producing 2 million tons of steel a year, rather than these giant companies producing

but we think a company like nucor has got a lot more going on. capital investments that they've put together in the last few years, and they're especially one in the raw material area where they're producing direct reduced iron, which is going to significantly reduce the raw material costs going into 2014. >> aldo, it was a pleasure. >>> shipping and steel down. last but not least, let's hit the rails with avondale's donald braughton. trading at just over 16 times earnings. the dividend, not that generous overall. why is this stock not overstretched? >> well, if you look at everything you've been talking about so far, it's all driven by one big thing, and that is fracking. fracking's very successful. it's driving an industrial revolution in the united states. and that is the direct beneficiaries are things like tankers. >> but we're going to have a story -- >> and steel and rails. >> we'll have a story directly following this about that explosion in north dakota. there's been concern -- and we were up in williston, right? about an hour ago, the b

hybrids that the administration has touted or subsidized, it's the big, powerful muscle cars, the nucorif my wife will let me get one. but also the ford mustangs and the new lighter through heavy use of aluminum, the ford f-150 pickup truck. >> the green car revolution, in essence, hasn't happened because sales, which are really good for american automobiles, in the market show the things that people are buying are trucks and sufficients. suvs. and that means people want size, they want comfort, they want power. >> reporter: ford sold over 760,000 f series trucks last year but only 35,000 hybrid cmax vehicles. the in the last two years large battery companies went bankrupt as did electric car maker fisker. all heavily subsidized by the obama administration. one proponent of between energy said he'd like to see more bankruptcies because it means the government is pushing the envelope of research and development. >> this is why i would love to see both liberals and conservatives supporting a broad range of investment in new energy technologies both applied and basic so that whatever happe