Electrolysis?

[Andy Burns]

I think someone didn't read the press pack...

"An electric arc furnace uses electrolysis to melt scrap metal"

[The Natural Philosopher]

Its the BBC. What did you expect?

[Chris Hogg]

But they employ such well qualified technical people and everything is 'verified'! /sarc

[Nick Odell]

I suppose that, in a sense, they do. They use electrolysis to separate out the hydrogen, to power the generator, to make the electricity to melt the steel.

To be honest, before I read it, I presumed the article was going to be about something similar to the new Swedish blast furnaces:

There's a limited availability of scrap metal, suitable for electric arc processes and the Swedes seem to be cutting electricity generation out of the energy cycle and using green hydrogen to fuel their blast furnaces for iron ore.

But yes, I agree that article is appallingly badly written. If a GCSE science student had written something like that, their teacher would surely have failed them.

Nick

[Chris Hogg]

Talking of electric arc furnaces and scrap steel, if British Steel plan to close its two Scunthorp blast furnaces and replace them with carbon arcs which will melt scrap steel, ostensibly to cut down on CO2 emissions and appear to be green, where is the UK raw steel going to come from?

It'll be imported from China or India where they are not so constrained by greenness and are quite happy to use blast furnaces to smelt iron ore, producing loads of CO2 in the process. So any claim by BS that by shutting Scunthorp blast furnaces they are contributing to net zero is just so much bollocks. They're just exporting the CO2 production to a third world country and not actually going to achieve an overall reduction in CO2 at all!

[alan_m]

Shh, don't ask so many questions. You should know by now that most of the green solutions are nothing more than smoke, mirrors, fairy dust and unicorn farts.

[The Natural Philosopher]

does any one else see the massive efficiency gains to be had using electricity to make electricity by the most complex and involved route possible?

/sarc

[charles]

A great many years ago, I had to sort out Ceefax reception for a BBC journalist. His ordinary pictures were so noisy (snowy) that it difficult to know how he put up with them. "Not a very good picture" I said. "I wouldn't know, I'm only a journalist" was the reply. He was the BBC News Science Correspondent. I reckon he got the job because he could pronounce the words. And, obviously he never watched a monitor in the studio.

[Andy Burns]

But /are/ they going to make hydrogen to burn, to generate power for the arc?

[Joe]

On the whole, the technical people don't mix with the creative ones. I did once point out to John Craven's team that Colorado beetles were probably 5mm long rather than 5cm, though of course someone else might have noticed before the (live) transmission. John didn't in rehearsal.

[Joe]

The technical people also get it wrong. I was there shortly before Ceefax went public, when a short news item was run to announce it. All was well during rehearsal, but the live transmission went to pot for a couple of seconds because nobody had realised that the Ceefax generator, which inserted its data into transmission output, derived its sync reference from transmission output...

[Chris Hogg]

BBC science reporters, of course!

[John Walliker]

I watched the first Ceefax encoder that was installed at Crystal Palace being built at Research Department. It was a rack full of hand-wired Veroboard. At the time, there were component shortages and that project got absolute priority at stores for anything they needed, so great was the push to get the system live before Oracle. I was in the lab next door where they were building a digital frame store out of 1kbit shift register memories. They used shift registers because they got them for a very good price compared with conventional ram. The frame store was then used for things like telecine buffer memory and NTSC/PAL standards conversion. John