Transnational Thursday is a thread for people to discuss international news, foreign policy or international relations history. Feel free as well to drop in with coverage of countries you’re interested in, talk about ongoing dynamics like the wars in Israel or Ukraine, or even just whatever you’re reading.
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https://www.telegraph.co.uk/business/2025/03/27/british-steels-chinese-owners-reject-500m-go-green/
What a pathetic story of British-style governance in action. Sell the steel industry to China. Wreck the economy with ridiculously expensive 'clean energy'. Lose basic industrial capabilities for warmaking or building anything. Lose jobs. Lose relevance. Lose everything, sooner or later (sooner).
Development economics needs a new category to go along with developing and developed, studying declining countries like the UK.
Australia does basically the same thing, albeit with the extra steps of 'bail out the industries wrecked by gross economic negligence' and 'invest in green hydrogen': https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/feb/20/whyalla-steelworks-government-bailout-administration-sa
Green hydrogen isn't even a thing, surely most physicists could tell you the concept is a fantasy. Who has ever dreamed of expensively converting electricity into hydrogen, struggling to store the ultra-leaky, diffuse, explosive gas and then turning the hydrogen back into electricity? Even in the fantasy-world of renewable energy economics it's an unusually silly dream. Nuclear power is still banned of course.
This is technically false - it means that the UK would be the only G7 country unable to manufacture its own pig iron for conversion into steel. And this explains what is going on. Because of our early industrialisation and early deindustrialisation, the UK is the Saudi Arabia of scrap steel.
Mass of available steel decreases very slowly - a bit gets lost to rust, and a bit gets lost to landfill, but most of the steel in a manufactured object or a steel-framed building is available for recycling at the end of its life. The total stock of steel the UK needs is increasing very slowly - the total weight of steel in manufactured goods in the UK has been high for a very long time. (The value-to-weight ratio of manufactured goods continues to increase so a lack of mass growth isn't necessarily a sign of impoverishment) and although I support a big increase in steel-framed building construction, the median voter doesn't. And the rate at which the stock of steel in the UK increases is covered by imports of imbedded steel in manufactured products. So we can meet our domestic needs for steel entirely by recycling scrap in electric arc furnaces.
The physical logic of keeping a blast furnace in the UK is based on us being a net exporter of refined steel products - and in practice those exports had to go to the EU because every country protects its domestic steel industry. So post-Brexit the blast furnaces were on borrowed time - the money for the next needed major renovation was never going to be invested on commercial terms.
Recycled steel can't be used in certain areas. If you want a gun barrel or a nuclear reactor or anything important and high-performance, you want virgin steel. It's a key capability for a major economy. A strong steel industry has flow on effects in construction, advanced engineering, munitions, shipbuilding, energy...
Every country protects its steel industry for a reason!
This is FUD from the legacy steelmakers in the US. In the UK, the speciality steel business (mostly based in Sheffield, as it has been since the Middle Ages, which is why Henry Bessemer moved there to found the modern steel industry) went electric arc first. The blast furnaces at Scunthorpe are fueling a long products mill - i.e. general construction grade steel.
We already have a company making gun barrels and nuclear reactor parts out of recycled steel.
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I disagree. I'm a proponent of the Electrify Everything movement, and I'm convinced it's going to be cheaper for 90% of the economy than burning fossil fuels is, within two decades.
You want green hydrogen for two things: blast furnaces for virgin steel (steel from iron ore, not from scrap) and cement kilns for concrete. Both processes will be difficult to electrify without hydrogen. The rest of what you're saying is true, of course. You only ever store hydrogen if you have access to a subterran salt cavern - because then its economical to run the electrolyzers when electricity is cheap, and make steel/cement 24/7. In all other cases, you just make the hydrogen on demand, and you throttle down production if electricity gets temporarily expensive.
If you have a truly gigantic salt cavern (those exist) and most countries in the west continue to refuse reforming their nuclear regulations, you might be doing seasonal energy storage on the side. Because in a future grid without nuclear, the renewables will need to be at least 30% overbuilt, which means you have zero cost electricity for months. In that case, adding a few GW of gas turbines or fuel cells to your steel/concrete plant might be worth it, even if you only run them during the yearly dunkelflaute.
Electrification is all well and good (clean air!) but why go to such a great effort in steel and cement? The capital base using coke/thermal coal is already there and paid for. There's 70-100 years of coke left, probably more if we look harder.
It just seems like an inefficient use of resources. Why would we even want to overbuild our electricity sector by 30% and have all this surplus/deficit in power? Just build more nuclear plants when we need more energy, keep them running 95% of the time and then switch over to fusion power. Keep using coke where needed, counter CO2 emissions with sulphate aerosols.
I guess it makes sense if the 'solar power is going to make energy insanely, ludicrously cheap' argument comes true. But they've been saying this for ages. It hasn't happened. We've been told that solar power is incredibly cheap, yet electricity prices have been rising even as we build more and more solar. I live in Australia. We're not short of solar potential! I think the whole narrative is an illusion. Actually cheap energy sources have high uptime and reliability - coal, gas, nuclear, hydro. I'm not aware of any major country whose electricity prices have fallen as a result of a transition to renewables.
Steel is 7% of global CO2 emissions, cement is 6%. And both are actually easier to electrify than agriculture, ocean shipping and jet flight - each also single digit percentage points of global emissions.
So if we stop short of steel and cement, we're so very much short of Everything, we might as well just give up and accept that global warming will be a continuous process that only stops after human civilization ends. I'm not yet willing to accept doomerism of that kind, I'd much rather build great things - which needs more steel and cement, meaning we need to electrify it in the field as soon as it begins to be cost competitive.
I share your frustrations, but I've been waiting for a reform of nuclear regulations for decades now. It's not going to happen, middling public support and close to zero political will across the aisle. We just can't do it, and now it's too late. Even regulatory nuclear revolution followed by a Manhattan project 2.0 would not make nuclear in any way relevant in the west. The timelines are too long and renewables+batteries have full industrial momentum now.
France, South Korea and China had the political will 30 years ago, and thus have momentum now, but nobody else does.
It has happened for everybody who bought solar cells. Investments in rooftop solar amortize in 5-10 years, after that it's pure profit/free power.
The rest will follow with cheap batteries. Technologically, we could roll out vehicle to grid today, and connect several TWh of batteries to the grid. Grid scale batteries are economical today, you just need to wait in the grid interconnection queue for a year or two until you can get your GW connections approved. It's happening right now, and it will only get faster from here. The price is right now, and shortly the full force of capitalism will do the rest.
Consumer prices might not follow, of course. Lots of monopolies, stupid regulations, lots of new investments...
Good points. In my mind I guess I conceptualize civilization as an accelerationist project that is going to end up reshaping or disassembling the world one way or another, so why bother with greenhouse gas emissions? We'll end up paving the Antarctic and Arctic with datacentres, heating the world with sheer mass of industry, turning wilderness into parkland... Like it or not we've subjugated nearly all land mammal biomass and we're moving in on the oceans. Why try to arrest the transformation now? It is our destiny...
If you've ever read the Keys to the Kingdom series, a major part of it is Arthur trying to preserve his humanity from the sorcerous power of the keys. He takes all these risks and limitations on his power, trying to stay mortal. But in the end he becomes a 12 foot tall winged immortal Denizen anyway, he is the Chosen One after all. The impulse to retain humanity in the face of general superiority always seemed strange to me, though I accept my opinion must be in the minority there and in ecology/climate too.
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I have. There was a short period of time where you could draw a straight line from the current (ineffective) storage methods to the promises of some developing technologies, then out a couple decades and get pretty impressive energy densities. Of course, it didn't actually happen and lithium batteries filled that niche instead.
Reading through your linked article, I thought it was obviously a hydrogen chemical plant, which would produce useful ingredients for industrial processes like steel production (there must be a reason to do it centralized instead of on-site, right?). But no, it's a power plant. Then I thought it must be a hydrocarbon refining plant that split off the easy-to-get hydrogen from hydrocarbons and used it in some sort of novel turbine that took advantage of its properties (Compared to natural gas, it has higher flame temperature, different exhaust gasses, and ?????). But no, it's a green hydrogen power plant. They're breaking water molecules in half then putting them back together again.
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Yes, this is the most egregious failing of our world from Dath Ilan rational paradise perspective.
Imagine alternate world that is just like us, except it has problems with food. Not like us, problems of too much food, but problems of not enough food.
In this world, in richest countries, people spend about half of their income on food, the poor regularly go hungry and it is not uncommon for the poorest to starve to death. And in poor countries, massive famines killing millions are normal occurence.
The world does not like it, and tries hard to remedy it. Every day, there is new government initiative to solve the food problem, every day there is new startup business promising new and revolutionary ersatz food from sawdust and coal. But the problem persists.
You, as visitor shocked with their plight, offer an obvious (to you) solution.
"Do you know you could use pesticides to kill pests and this way to raise agricultural yield by order of magnitude?"
"Here are some very simple ones your chemical industry can easily manufacture."
"This way, no one will have to go hungry, food will be in such abundance that even homeless could be as fat as millionaires!"
The locals, shocked and horrified, answer:
"This is organophosphate chemistry! This is NERVE GAS! Do you want to kill us all? Are you Adenoid Hynkel, the most evil man that ever lived?"
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