Pre-atomic steel from sunken warships has become unexpectedly valuable to an industry that cannot tolerate the radioactive contamination present in every ton of metal forged after 1945.
In June 1919, the captured German fleet was scuttled by its own crews at Scapa Flow in Scotland — and a century later those wrecks have become a strange commodity, because their steel, made decades before the first atomic bomb, is free of the faint radioactive fallout baked into every batch produced since 1945
Brendan Brown