Chapter 91 Steel Crisis (Please Subscribe!)

The fleet carried the ambassadors and diplomatic delegations that Arthur had prepared for a long time.

Of course, Princess Louise was also among them, and Margaret and Patricia would naturally follow.

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

At the same time, Butler Hunter was also among them. He would accompany the fleet to Europe and be responsible for the creation of the award.

Arthur gave the upcoming scientific research award a name with important meaning, the Victoria Award.

In name, it was to commemorate Arthur's beloved grandmother Queen Victoria, but it was also inevitable to borrow Queen Victoria's reputation to make the newly born award quickly famous in Europe.

In order to prevent the Nobel Prize, which has not yet been born, from impacting the Victoria Prize, Arthur specially prepared a reward of up to 300,000 pounds for the Victoria Prize. Even with six major awards including the Literature Award, Physics Award, Chemistry Award, Mathematics Award, Medicine Award, and Science and Technology Award, the winner of each award can still receive support worth 50,000 pounds.

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

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

Even in the highly developed economy of Britain, the annual income of senior professors is only a few thousand pounds.

The prize money of any Victoria Prize is enough to make senior British professors earn dozens or even hundreds of years.

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

The Victoria Prize will also become a weapon for Australia to attract high-end talents, and in the next few years, decades or even hundreds of years, it will allow Australia to maintain sufficient reputation and appeal in the scientific research community.

The cost of holding the award each year is only more than 300,000 pounds. Although it seems a lot, it is completely affordable for Arthur's property.

What's more, the reconstruction of the production line of the car factory is also in full swing. Cars will also bring a lot of income to Arthur, which is a huge market of hundreds of millions or even billions of pounds.

Arthur chose to stay in Australia. It was not that Arthur did not value this trip to the Netherlands, but that Australia currently had too many important projects, and Arthur had to supervise them personally.

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

This also led to the smooth progress of land acquisition for railway construction.

Most of the places where the railway passes are uninhabited wastelands. Some of them have already been allocated land, and Australia has also 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 and compensate for the same area of ​​reclaimed land.

Why is the Australian government so generous? Don't ask, just ask because there are too many indigenous people.

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

Although various industrial constructions will also cause hundreds of indigenous people to shed blood and sacrifice every month, in the face of huge manpower replenishment, the number of deaths of hundreds of indigenous people every month is nothing.

As one of the most valued construction projects, the construction of the railway has made Arthur and Australia invest a lot.

As for workers, more than 20 German experts were involved in the planning and exploration of railway construction, and hundreds of trained Australian railway workers were also involved.

Needless to say, cheap labor has at least 5,000 indigenous peoples been assigned to railway construction, and the number is increasing by at least 1,000 people per month.

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

Australia is building a wide-gauge railway, which has a significant improvement in transportation capacity, the train will run very smoothly, and the interior of the carriage will become more spacious and comfortable.

Of course, wide-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 increase.

However, now that Australia has neither a shortage of funds nor a shortage of land, it is obvious that wide-gauge railways are more suitable.

At the same time, most of the 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 the construction of this railway, the entire design team had already made plans to convert the entire railway into a double track at any time.

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

This has also alleviated the demand for Australia's steel production to a certain extent.

According to estimates by German experts, Australia's railway construction consumes about 170 tons of rails per kilometer, and the entire railway requires at least nearly 700,000 tons of rails.

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

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

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

Cars are also a big beast that swallows iron. Building a car also requires a lot of steel, ranging from a few hundred kilograms to tons.

Once cars are popular in the world market in the future, the steel needed to build cars alone may require tens of thousands of tons per year.

This has been very busy for Minister Pierre.

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

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

Under the premise of having technology, equipment, mineral resources, funds and manpower, it is very simple to expand the scale of steel production.

But if these prerequisites are not available, it is not 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 required to build new steel mills and expand their scale, there are no other problems.

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