Re: Andrew Marr's Modern History, tonight the 80s

On Wed, 13 Jun 2007 00:41:52 -0700, Sofa - Spud
<comfysofas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:


Do you suppose that we'd use the coal for power stations? say there
had been no thatcher and the miners had continued. Where was the coal
going ? into big piles , it was too expensive to sell in europe
especially as cheap good quality Spanish coal was really coming into
the market . The spanish mines were undeveloped during the Franco
years and in the 70's after he died they developed and sold the cheap
coal to germany and france . No market for our coal , no market for
our steel either .

The only coal fired power station I can think of is Drax and they want
that shut as it pollutes - how would miners go down in this carbon
obscessed world?

You forget there is huge time period between 1984 and today. With the
exception of carbon dioxide the majority of the pollutants produced
from burning coal can be eliminated or vastly reduced by the use of
fluidised bed combustion. The UK led the world in research in this
field by a huge margin and had a pilot plant in operation 25 years
ago. Thatcher, in her infinite wisdom of hating all things coal,
killed funding for this project in the early 1980's meaning the
prospect of clean coal in the UK was strangled at birth.

20 years down the line the world that wishes to burn coal (and it is a
significant market) has turned to the Japanese and the Americans who
basically nicked the British design and claimed it as their own,
making huge sums of money in the process. So instead of clean coal
technology, using UK produced coal as part of a balanced, secure
energy policy, the deregulated UK power industry went natural gas
crazy for power generation in the 1990's taking the UK from 50+ years
known reserves of Natural Gas to less than 15 years known reserves in
little more than a decade.

I mentioned above there was an exception for carbon dioxide, but the
carbon capture requirements for gas, oil, and coal fired power
stations are essentially the same. It's a "maybe" but when the experts
that the UK had on fluidised bed combustion completed their work some
of them would have probably moved on to something challenging and new
and by now we could have had full scale carbon capture projects in
service.

So in summary in around 18 years we lost the ability to mine our own
coal, we burnt nearly all the gas, we became reliant on imported gas
from unstable foreign states, we lost the ability to lead the world in
clean coal technology, we spent all the oil revenue on propping up
mass unemployment, we lost huge portions of manufacturing industry, we
failed to renew crumbling national infrastructure, and we sold off the
family silver to finance unemployment benefit.

But going back to the miners, I'm not in favour of men going
underground and risking their health to keep the lights on, but I am
very bitter about what could have been a golden era for the UK being
completely wasted. The failings of Thatcher and chums are only just
becoming apparent to the public at large and those failings will
cripple the UK for decades and, if you take a less optimistic view,
centuries


--
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