Stats for nerds
5recommend
6mentions
5people
2018–2025years
100% recommend
Mentions per year
What Hacker News says
- 81. Failure is Not an Option by Gene Kranz
82. Mrs. P’s Journey by Phyllis Pearsall
83. River of Doubt by Candice Millard
84. Longitude by Dava Sobel
85. Dreaming in Code by Scott Rosenberg
86. The Last Viking - A biography of Roald Amundsen
87. The Wager by David Grann
88. Simply Fly by Captain G. R. Gopinath
89. Engines That Move Markets by Alasdair G. M. Nairn
90. The Education of Cyrus by Xenophon
91. Boyd: The Fighter Pilot Who Changed the Art of War by Robert Coram
92. Madhouse at the End of the Earth by Julian Sancton
93. How to Make a Spaceship by Julian Guthrie
94. West with the Night by Beryl Markham
95. The Age of Uncertainty by Tobias Hürter
96. American Steel by Richard Preston
97. Showstopper by G. Pascal Zachary
98. Eccentric Orbits by John Bloom
99. The Great Bridge by David McCullough
100. Loonshots by Safi Bahcall
101. The Art of Doing Science and Engineering by Richard Hamming
102. Where Wizards Stay Up Late by Katie Hafner
103. The Evening Star by Henry S. F. Cooper
- For a fascinating read about Nucor, the competitor that surpassed US Steel, I'd recommend Richard Preston's American Steel.
- For an overview of how Nucor became #1 in the US steel industry, see "American Steel" (1992) by Richard Preston. The author was present for the building and startup of Nucor's first continuous thin sheet casting mini-mill. Nucor bought a new experimental continuous caster from a German company, after trying to build their own, and built a mill around it. This plant could turn scrap metal into sheet steel. "You could punch garbage cans out of it all day." Gradually, the quality improved, and soon they were making steel for auto parts. Previously, steel recycling just produced lower grade steel - cars in, rebar out. So this closed the recycling cycle.
The amount of steel in use per capita in developed countries seems to have reached a constant level. About 69% of steel produced in the US is the same steel going round and round. If you ignore rebar, low-grade steel stuck inside concrete, it's even higher. It's the developing countries that are still making and using new steel. They don't have enough steel infrastructure yet.
"Mini-mill", in this context, means "smaller than a square mile". Here's Nucor's Crawfordsville plant.[1] It's not small. Compare with US Steel's Gary Works.[2] That century old plant is just about their last remaining big plant in the US.
US Steel somehow missed this change.
[1] https://earth.google.com/web/@39.97805108,-86.8271336,264.41...
[2] https://earth.google.com/web/@41.62932676,-87.36187513,174.7...
- The book American Steel by Richard Preston is an engaging read about the rise of Nucor.
- Iron/carbon phase diagram: http://www.substech.com/dokuwiki/doku.php?id=iron-carbon_pha...
The eutectic of iron and carbon (mixture with the minimum melting point) is 4.3% carbon by mass.
There's a chapter from Richard Preston's "American Steel" (a 1992 book that I highly recommend about the Nucor minimill in Crawfordsville, Indiana) where they find at one point during the startup of the then-cutting-edge continuous casting line that the steel in arc furnace had too little carbon. They decided to solve that (expensively, for the purpose of the testing) by dipping the electrodes into the steel and letting their ends dissolve.
- American Steel by Richard Preston is under-appreciated. A market opportunity is identified, and a so-crazy-that-it-just-might-work design for a new type of steel mill is pursued by crazy maverick cowboys. The true story of Nucor Steel.
