Maybe it’s just that warships have more in the way of large, flat steel plates (which is what the main usage seems to be).
Presumably there’s not as much market for pre-WW2 steel in girder form, but it’s a good question.
We let the Brits test theirs in NV
In Goleta, CA a coworker told me about a leakage of Tritium (?) at a previous work place in the late 70’s or early 80’s. For health and safety reasons, everyone who was exposed was sent to some medical facility in Nevada, where detectors scanned for any residual radiation. The testing was done inside of an old bank vault from the 30’s, because it remained uncontaminated from the fallout of nuclear explosions. This was the first I’d ever heard of pre-Atomic Age steel, much less the application.
No, they tested theirs in Australia. At some point in the 1950s, the UK started using US designs, so in a sense, they tested theirs in Nevada, because their nukes were our nukes.
But it’s hardly like there were wholly British nuke test series in Nevada.
UK testing in Nevada went slightly beyond merely using designs that the US had tested there. From 1962 onward there were a series of joint UK-US tests, at least some of which were probably of designs jointly customised for UK programmes, notably under Chevaline.
But the only such tests that were above ground were zero-yield, so these exceptions are rather incidental to the thread.
Bits have been salvaged from the remaining German Scapa Flow wrecks from time to time, for this purpose.