These massive presses are/were of strategic importance. Something politicians, most of whom seem to be lawyers these days, completely fail to grasp. I am not in general a fan of government subsidy, but I was very disappointed when the government of the UK declined to fund a large press in Sheffield, which would have been used to build the next generation of nuclear reactors. June 2010 timeframe. Luckily natural gas is cheap and has no geopolitical supply chain problems eh?
We're not going to build the nuclear reactors either. The problem will finally be solved by re-permitting onshore wind and a lot of batteries imported from China.
(The "local supply chain is vulnerable to political uncertainty over long term project funding" problem is much worse in regard to trains, and has resulted in losing most of our train building capacity. See HS2 fiasco.)
This is basically a pipe dream. But as long as the subsides are going to Big Green scammers, we will have numerically ignorant journalists peddling this bullshit.
I don’t understand how anyone can push that “solution” with a straight face. Surely they have worked out the numbers and figured out it’s not realistic at all, right,…,right ?
