Chapter 91 Steel Crisis (Please subscribe!)

This fleet is naturally carrying the ambassador candidates and diplomatic delegation that Arthur has prepared for a long time.

Of course, Princess Louise was among them this time, and Margaery and Patricia would naturally follow.

As for the reason why Princess Louis went to the Netherlands, it goes without saying.

At the same time, Butler Hunter is also among them. He will accompany the fleet to Europe and be responsible for establishing the award.

Arthur gave the upcoming scientific research award a meaningful name, the Victoria Award.

It is nominally in memory of Arthur's dear grandmother, Queen Victoria, but it is inevitable to borrow Queen Victoria's reputation to make the newly born award quickly become famous in Europe.

In order to prevent the impact of the yet-to-be-born Nobel Prize on the Victoria Prize, Arthur specially prepared an award of up to 300,000 pounds for the Victoria Prize, even if it has awards including literature, physics, chemistry, mathematics, medicine, science and technology. The winner of each of the six major awards, including the 2018 National Award, will still receive support worth 50,000 pounds.

This bonus has far exceeded the first Nobel Prize in history, and is even three or four times as much.

Moreover, if the winner of the award can go to Australia to work for at least ten years, the Australian royal family will provide additional research funds and venues.

Even in the UK, which has a very developed economy, the annual income of senior professors is only a few thousand pounds.

The prize money for any Victoria Award is equivalent to the income of a senior British professor for dozens or even hundreds of years.

Coupled with the huge reputation from Queen Victoria, it can be expected that the new Victoria Prize will definitely be more popular than the original Nobel Prize in history.

The Victoria Award will also become a powerful tool for Australia to attract high-end talents, allowing Australia to maintain sufficient prestige and attractiveness in the scientific research community in the coming years, decades or even centuries.

The annual cost of organizing the awards is only more than 300,000 pounds. Although it seems like a lot, it is completely affordable for Arthur's property.

What's more, the reconstruction of the production lines of automobile factories is also in full swing. Cars will also bring a lot of revenue to Arthur, which is a huge market worth hundreds of millions or even billions of pounds.

Arthur chose to stay in Australia. This does not mean that Arthur does not attach importance to this trip to the Netherlands. It is just that Australia currently has too many important projects and Arthur must personally supervise them.

The railway construction plan is one of the most important development plans in Australia at present. Since the birth of the plan, it has attracted the attention and attention of a large number of Australians.

This also resulted in the land acquisition for railway construction proceeding very smoothly.

Most of the places that the railways pass through are desolate wastelands. Some of them have already been allocated land, and Australia has purchased them at twice the market price.

Of course, for those who are unwilling to exchange for money, the Australian government will also organize the indigenous people to reclaim the land and compensate them for the same area of ​​reclaimed land.

Don’t ask why the Australian government is so generous. Just ask because there are so many indigenous people.

At present, Australia has nearly 20,000 indigenous people involved in construction, and the number is increasing at a rate of nearly 6,000 per month.

Although various industrial constructions will also result in the bloodshed and sacrifice of hundreds of indigenous people every month, in the face of huge manpower supplements, the number of deaths of hundreds of indigenous people every month is nothing.

As one of the most important construction projects, the construction of the railway has attracted a lot of investment from both Arthur and Australia.

In terms of workers, more than twenty German experts were invested in the planning and exploration of railway construction, and hundreds of trained Australian railway workers were also invested.

Needless to say, there is no need to say much about cheap labor. At least 5,000 indigenous people have been deployed for railway construction, and the number is increasing by at least 1,000 people every month.

At the same time, major steel plants also began to work overtime to produce rails. The reason why railway construction has become one of the symbols of industrial countries is that building railways not only consumes a lot of manpower and material resources, but also tests the country's steel production.

Australia is building broad-gauge railways, which have significantly improved transport capacity. The trains will run very smoothly and the interior of the carriages will become more spacious and comfortable.

Of course, broad-gauge railways also have very obvious disadvantages, that is, they will occupy more area, the cost of bridges and tunnels will increase, and the turning radius will also increase.

But now, because Australia lacks neither funds nor land, it is obvious that broad gauge railways are more suitable.

At the same time, most of this railway is a single-track railway, and only some sections with relatively large traffic are designed with double-track railways.

Of course, this is not absolute. Before building this railway, the entire design team had already made plans to change the entire railway to a double track at any time.

As long as there is any need in the future, any section of this railway can be reconstructed and turned into a double-track railway.

This has also eased demand for Australian steel production to a certain extent.

According to estimates by German experts, Australian railway construction consumes approximately 170 tons of steel rails per kilometer, and the entire railway requires at least nearly 700,000 tons of steel rails.

If additional consumption of tunnels, bridges, stations, etc. is added, then the entire railway requires at least 800,000 tons of steel production.

Although this is the total consumption of more than ten years of construction time, it consumes an average of at least 80,000 tons of steel every year.

Australia's current steel production cannot keep up with this figure for the time being, so expanding the scale of steel plants is an urgent problem that needs to be solved.

Cars are also big beasts. Building a car also requires a large amount of steel, ranging from hundreds of kilograms to tons.

Once cars become popular in the world market in the future, tens of thousands of tons of steel may be needed each year just to build cars.

This has kept Industry Minister Pierre very busy.

All of a sudden, all the pressure came to Minister Pierre. The Ministry of Industry could only speed up the construction of industrial zones and steel plants, invest more indigenous people, and expand the production scale of the steel plants as much as possible.

Fortunately, in this era, it is difficult to expand the scale of steel production, and it is easy to say simple.

Expanding the scale of steel production is simple given the availability of technology, equipment, mineral resources, capital and manpower.

But without these prerequisites, it will not be easy to expand the scale of steel production.

Australia is lucky enough to have no shortage of resources, equipment, technology, manpower, experts, and funds. Apart from the time it takes to build new steel plants and expand their scale, there are no other problems.

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