Steel mill wet scrap incident

Magnetic crane lifting rain-soaked scrap into the steel furnace, illustrating the everyday source of 1–3 ppm hydrogen in commercial steel heats.

If I just make a heat of steel in a steel mill and I don't do anything special with drying this stuff off, I might get between one and three parts per million hydrogen in that steel, just from the grease and other things on the scrap steel that I throw into the furnace. I was at a steel mill once and it was raining outdoors. The magnetic crane grabbed about five or ten tons of scrap and was moving it indoors to put it into the hot furnace. Water was just pouring out of it into the steel furnace. Okay, so that's how you get three parts per million hydrogen in your steel.