(Grumble grumnble "504 Gateway Time-out"s... Writing this elsewhere for pasting in once it works again.)
Been a while since I've seen it, but my interpretation is that Superfreezingbreath applied to the refinery/whatever may not be so easy to make an "area effect" (and perhaps not even locally without risking blowing stuff around that shouldn't really be), and would need a lot of going over various bits while other bits are still out of control. Get a lake, breath it frozen to your satisfaction (thick enough to lift[1], not so think that it will not notionally melt (yes, a tricky one that) before reaching the target, and let it rain over the entire area at once. Also means that superbreath does not affect the firefighters (who just get wet, instead) that would get caught in the blast. Probably not healthy to them.
Nobody's said anything about the runoff of chemicals, bulked up with all that super-provided water, however... Well, probably they either ignore that in the bad old days of the early '80s(?), or they already have a plan at hand to deal with their normal extinguishing water supply.
The satellite thing... I always imagined that it was actually a
Notional Scientific Advisory project and already had that capability under wraps, as well as its public purpose. But I might be reading(/watching) something into that that wasn't even there in the first place, due to the separation of years since viewing
(Ach, 504s even preventing me previewing my edits properly!)
(edit; In fact I must even have posted it into a 504 situation, leaving it in a mess. Making it better.)[1] Although as an extension to "anything Superman wears is nearly as indistructable as himself[1], it is seen that when he grabs a falling helicopter by the skid and stops its fall very rapidly, it does not just shear off. Strangely, so don't the wings of a jet plane tear off (in the reboot movie) and even the relatively fragile front end just crumples a bit, then the plane is slowly lowered without its back breaking under the unusual load conditions it experiences.
[2] Excepting the occasional damage to Clerk Kent's clothes, of course, caused by substances full of that element 'humorusium'.