Keeping the lights on Documentary BBC4 - Interesting demise of coal produced electricity

[blenkie1]

It was fascinating. I don't think we've lost the know-how to get the coal out, it's just that we're not allowed to use it. In my opinion if it's there we ought to get it, either by digging or gasification underground,

Personally I'd like to see the old gasworks come back - coal is so much more than fuel, it's a valuable source of chemicals. Also the coke is used used in our steel works.

Pass me the whisky and a revolver.

http://www.gridwatch.templar.co.uk/

PS - can we keep politics out of this thread please.

The know how will be lost. We used to build our own nuclear power stations but have to get the French and Chinese to build them now. You need young blood to learn and pass that knowledge on and now it's been lost there is no way that Britain will ever mine coal again with out help from foreign powers.

I spent 11 years in a smallish coal mine less than 50 yards from my house. Employed about 125 men at its peak. When it closed it had over 100 years worth of coal reserves left at its current extraction. The only thing in its way was a major fault coming up from the earths core and running most of the length of Northumberland. The owners needed about a million to access the reserves but was denied any of it even though European coal produces Germany, Poland were getting huge grants to subsides there industry. Why were we not allowed it? We happened to be the most efficient coal mine in Europe so we didn't qualify! Basically what they were saying if we were lazy and had loads of waste we could get a load of money to keep it going!

Many good memories though probably the best work I have ever done everyone knew what to do and just got on with it. Defiantly the most dangerous place I've ever worked though. 2 men died the time I was there. Broke my wrist and foot and many near misses. You got home and knew you had been at work.

 

[rtbcomp]

A pic of a street in liverpool early 60's thats not fog but smog,cause of x amount of people dying with lung problems....apparently the smog was thousands of homes burning bad coal since victorian times up to the time they stopped using it as a fuel to heat up the home.

I remember us burning coal, and also sets - these were tar impregnated wooden blocks, used in road building and became available for fuel in the late 1950s. The coal was burnt on an open grate, and combustion would have been poor, leading to the particles in the atmosphere that produced smog. Chimney fires were common which put jet black smoke out. Smoke from houses caused pollution at street level because the chimneys were relatively close to the ground. So it was no wonder people died too young.

Some houses burnt coke, but this could only be burned in closed stoves.

 

[blenkie1]

Bringing some memories back now! The mine I worked at was fairly unique. Coal was worked around here about the 15th century with the drift I worked at around 1750 and really got going in 1842 and actually went under a castle! One thing working in a mine learnt me you could basically do anything with a long pole and a load of chocks. The mine cars weighed over a ton and often came off the way. With the mine being about 4 mile in you soon learnt to put it back on the way with careful positioning of pole and chocks. Took a load of photos before I closed.

 

[penfold]

I did a course with the OU a few years ago about the alternatives available and on the drawing board of generating power. Waves, tides, the Seven Bore, gas, the sun, coal etc. Even then there were technologies proposed and proven to clean and capture the output of the coal stations to well within the limits required but the government was not interested. Another thing was that the coal imported to burn in the stations was crap compared to our own high class reserves but of course Maggie saw to it that that was a no goer to!

Wave and tide energy is plentiful but the machinery to collect it is not yet perfected and even when it is the capital cost makes offshore wind turbines look cheap. Assuming you refer to carbon capture there are a couple of working technologies for this but the basic block is the gross inefficiency; you end up burning 50%+ extra coal to generate the same amount of power. The only scaleable and dispatchable carbon-free power available now and for the forseeable future is nuclear, although if the government persist in not regenerating an indigenous construction capability we should bring in the South Koreans to build them, not the Chinese.

 

[blenkie1]

The chinese are being brought in to back it with money not technology? I would of thought the French were more capable of building a nuclear power station than any other nation. My impression was the French were designing/building it and the chinese were simply backing it. Were Finland not developing a safer (but not totally safe) nuclear power station? I agree though it has to be nuclear but what do we do in the mean time its going to take more than one and how long will all these take to build knowing this country reputation for time and cost overruns?

 

[penfold]

The evidence of Olkiluoto and Flamanville suggest otherwise; the expertise won over the 20 years of intensive reactor construction 1970-1990 has been frittered away, Areva have been swallowed whole by french and finnish bureaucracy and are functionally bankrupt. It's pretty sad really.

 

[penfold]

Seemingly the chinese were looking into thorium salt, no plutonium, all waste low level and no chance of Chernobyl type mishaps...

There are a number of academic and commercial investigations into thorium power; the chinese are spending the most money, perhaps a billion on the project with the intent of having a research reactor running by 2020 and a pilot power station by 2025. India were spending quite a bit, but since Modi signed a load of agreements for uranium supply I suspect funding will reduce a lot. Norway, France, the Czech Republic all have research programmes, as does the US DOE, although all are poorly funded. There are several commercial ventures, the most promising of which proposes using a small modular reactor to supply steam for producing oil sand in Canada. The only significant british effort is Moltex but the technical challenges are large and probably unfundable. A lot of work was done in the US in the 1950s-60s, they actually had a reactor running but Nixon binned the funding in favour of the Breeder Reactor programme, which in turn was cancelled by Clinton after billions had been spent learning how to not design breeder reactors. The theory of liquid fueled reactors is sound and if a practical model can be devised(and all indications from the US experimental reactor suggested this is possible) they would offer massive efficiency and cost savings over existing nuclear technology, as well as having intrinsic passive safety.

 

[penfold]

Certainly exotics like SiC and various new types of graphite are likely prospects for making reactor components and pipework; dealing with radioactive liquid that's 700 degrees C isn't a trivial matter and will test the materials boffins' ability to invent and the engineers' ability to ignore them and build it anyway.

 

[blenkie1]

I heard rumours they reckon graphene might have an application in that field (one of the few things we are sensibily chucking R&D cash at, though we should be chucking more at it and patenting as much as possible....)

Seemingly we are not making the patents on graphene the chinese are.

On another note its was leaked (on purpose?) that Russia was building a torpedo with a cobalt nuclear warhead and seemingly no body would survive not even in bunkers. Scary stuff. Anybody explain the science?

 

[penfold]

A nuclear bomb with a cobalt jacket was discussed in the 1960s as a kind of doomsday or scorched earth weapon, as cobalt's radioactive isotope cobalt 60 is short-lived enough to be hazardous but not short-lived enough to decay quickly and stop being hazardous; a battlefield or city contaminated with it would have to be abandoned while it was cleaned up. In practice groundburst nuclear weapons create enough contamination that faffing around with cobalt isn't worth the effort. The russian torpedo appears to be a comedy propaganda effort worthy of the Daily Mail, it has negligible value tactically or strategically.

 

[penfold]

The russians have had underwater 'rockets' for a while; the Shkval was devised as a counterfire weapon for submarines to fire back at NATO subs that have fired torpedoes at them to force them to break the wireguiding. Unfortunately the nature of the supercavitation means it's practically impossible to guide them sonically like conventional torpedoes, so the odds of hitting anything are slim. The physics of shoving things through the water at 100kts or whatever means the idea it will be stealthy in any meaningful way is nonsense; even if a silent propulsion system could be devised the flow noise alone would be about as silent as a drunk person trying to come in quietly after closing time.