The Future of Power Generation in Great Britain

[Ali G]

The spat between Scargill and Thatcher which spiralled out of control has been postulated as being the cause of the politicising of MMGW to be used to nail the lid shut on the NUM and coal powered electricity generation which was to be dumped in favour of fission.

The law of unintended consequences then kicked into action - Big Style.

Edited: Best get his name right at least.

Edited by Ali G on Friday 15th December 12:54

[MYOB]

rolando said:

Evanivitch & Paddy

Were either of you around in the winter of 1973/74?

I doubt it, judging by your comments.

Blimey Mr Dinosaur. Keep going.

[MYOB]

V8 Fettler said:

I'm old enough, thanks. Your subsequent post is probably wherever you left it.

It wasn't your age I was referring to.

[Gary C]

wc98 said:

Gary C said:

True, most of our alpha contamination at our site is in the pond water, and most of that is imported from sellafield in the spent fuel flasks.

do you know what happens to all the ceramic pellets that are at the end of the fuel rods in the stainless steel tubes used in the magnox reactors ? i used to run a department in an industrial ceramics company that made millions of them over the years and often wondered what happened to them at end of life.

You mean AGR ?, stainless steel in a magnox reactor would have absorbed too many neutrons for the reactor to work. In the AGR they used stainless steel cans and enriched ceramic uranium. If you were making ceramic pellets but not out of enriched uranium, I wonder if you were making dummy test fuel elements ?

Were they about 20mm round with a hole in the middle, in meter long stainless steel tubes ?

Magnon used natural metallic uranium in a magnesium oxide can (I.e. Magnox).

Magnox cans went through splitters to remove most of the can, then put in ponds. Some were open air and seagulls used to swim on them. One lady nearby used to feed the gulls, with the result they had to dig up her drive and store it as low level waste.
Ponds are still there with the fuel, but covered and efforts are now being made to recover and dry store the fuel.

AGR ceramic pellets were meant to be reprocessed in the THORP plant into new fuel, but it never won the contracts it needed to be successful, so the spent fuel sits in storage. We lost Japanese contracts when it became known that an employee who was meant to measure the size of the fuel pellets in batches, was making up the numbers. It since came out, that actually there was no need to actually do the measurements, but they used it as a reason to withdraw from the contract..


Edit oh ! I think the top and bottom pellets in an AGR fuel can might be inert ones , maybe it's them you made. Will enquire at work

Other possibility, it they are round, then were they doped with boron ?, if so, they are still sat in silos ready to be injected into the core to shut it down if the rods fail to drop.

Edited by Gary C on Friday 15th December 15:00

Edited by Gary C on Friday 15th December 15:14

[Gary C]

Evanivitch said:

rolando said:

Evanivitch & Paddy

Were either of you around in the winter of 1973/74?

I doubt it, judging by your comments.

No I wasn't. Clearly therefore I can't have any opinion on energy security, WW2, dinosaurs or 80s music. A shame really.

Question still stands, where do you think UK coal comes from?

Correction, where do think the coal for UK power stations comes from?

But where could uk coal come from ? We have lots of it and could be completely self sufficient in it. It's more expensive and higher quality than the brown coal imported from open cast mines, so we stopped using uk coal in the 90's to make more money. Being mostly anthracite, it burns cleaner too.

Now there are no deep mines open in the uk, they would require a massive investment to reopen (seams tend to collapse apparently if not maintained) but if we wanted to, we could go back to coal, build new stations and not worry about security or stability.

But we won't. Politically this would be unacceptable, because of co2.

[Evanivitch]

Gary C said:

But where could uk coal come from ? We have lots of it and could be completely self sufficient in it. It's more expensive and higher quality than the brown coal imported from open cast mines, so we stopped using uk coal in the 90's to make more money. Being mostly anthracite, it burns cleaner too.

Now there are no deep mines open in the uk, they would require a massive investment to reopen (seams tend to collapse apparently if not maintained) but if we wanted to, we could go back to coal, build new stations and not worry about security or stability.

But we won't. Politically this would be unacceptable, because of co2.

And because open cast mining is devastating to local areas, by-products of coal production are burdensome, we don't have the infrastructure to distribute coal around the country, no one wants a new coal power station near their home and no one wants to work in a deep coal mine either unless they're being paid good money for it (which they never have been in the UK).

[alangla]

Erm... Killoch opencast in Ayrshire is still open and still supplies a decent amount of coal to the power stations in Nottinghamshire...

There's plenty of other ex-Scottish Coal opencast pits in the hinterland around Kilmarnock/Cumnock/Lanark that haven't been cleaned up yet and could probably be re-opened if the price of coal rose sufficiently.

[Gary C]

Evanivitch said:

And because open cast mining is devastating to local areas, by-products of coal production are burdensome, we don't have the infrastructure to distribute coal around the country, no one wants a new coal power station near their home and no one wants to work in a deep coal mine either unless they're being paid good money for it (which they never have been in the UK).

Your wrong on most points there I'm afraid.

They don't need to use open cast. Deep mines are well know tech, infact one is being sunk in the north east for potash and plenty of people are happy to work in it. People WERE paid good money to work in deep mines (my dad and my grandad were both miners) with good pensions.
The cost factor is not miners, it's us paying for the coal. Cheap imports stopped uk mines from making a profit, but again, costs. It would be cheaper than 100% wind (or nuclear)

We have the same infrastructure to distribute coal as we had during the height of coal generation (the railways)

And im sure, given the small foot print of a coal station, the major objection today to a new coal station would be the co2 emissions.

Edited by Gary C on Friday 15th December 17:15

Edited by Gary C on Friday 15th December 17:16

Edited by Gary C on Friday 15th December 17:16

[Gary C]

Paddy_N_Murphy said:

And no one would want to work in the mines anymore.

Why not ?

When my dad was down the pit, his first job was looking after the pit ponies. But mining isn't like that anymore. To be honest it isn't even like man riders and ncb trepanners either. Hugely remote mechanised, wouldn't really need to get dirty anymore.

[Ali G]

I wouldn't be surprised if emissions could be scrubbed clean of the majority of most nasties given modern tech and a green light.

The challenges facing coal mining were not limited to technical ones, but also political activism/management practices which affected many other UK industries but given the role that coal played in UK energy, it would have been particularly attractive to ultra-activists such as Scargill.

[wc98]

Gary C said:

You mean AGR ?, stainless steel in a magnox reactor would have absorbed too many neutrons for the reactor to work. In the AGR they used stainless steel cans and enriched ceramic uranium. If you were making ceramic pellets but not out of enriched uranium, I wonder if you were making dummy test fuel elements ?

Were they about 20mm round with a hole in the middle, in meter long stainless steel tubes ?

Magnon used natural metallic uranium in a magnesium oxide can (I.e. Magnox).

Magnox cans went through splitters to remove most of the can, then put in ponds. Some were open air and seagulls used to swim on them. One lady nearby used to feed the gulls, with the result they had to dig up her drive and store it as low level waste.
Ponds are still there with the fuel, but covered and efforts are now being made to recover and dry store the fuel.

AGR ceramic pellets were meant to be reprocessed in the THORP plant into new fuel, but it never won the contracts it needed to be successful, so the spent fuel sits in storage. We lost Japanese contracts when it became known that an employee who was meant to measure the size of the fuel pellets in batches, was making up the numbers. It since came out, that actually there was no need to actually do the measurements, but they used it as a reason to withdraw from the contract..


Edit oh ! I think the top and bottom pellets in an AGR fuel can might be inert ones , maybe it's them you made. Will enquire at work

Other possibility, it they are round, then were they doped with boron ?, if so, they are still sat in silos ready to be injected into the core to shut it down if the rods fail to drop.

Edited by Gary C on Friday 15th December 15:00

Edited by Gary C on Friday 15th December 15:14

yep, it was the inert top and bottom ones we made. two different diameters. the density spec you provided for the ceramic was so low we could have fired a handful of non compacted powder and hit it i knew about the faked test results issue. the senior blokes that ended up carrying the can for it did very well out of it from what i can remember. they certainly weren't unhappy about the outcome the last time the paid us a visit. i can't remember their names now but they were always interesting to talk to, nice blokes as well.

we used to have to jump through hoops (rightly so) to get clearance to use things like wd40 for cleaning tools and the fact the tool faces that made the pellets in the "green" state were carbide made a lot of people nervous until we convinced them our inspection process would never let any carbide contamination through. it stuck out like a sore thumb on near white 99.5% ceramic ,producing dark blue spotting. we all had a little laugh when we heard what had been happening with the inspections on the other pellet diameters .

as you say there was actually no need for that inspection, from what i understand it was physically impossible to make one out of spec on the o/d, the die and the material used wouldn't allow it. our stuff was 19.5% smaller after sintering/firing so despite your density tolerance being exceptionally wide we still had to hit the numbers every time.

[wc98]

Gary C said:

Why not ?

When my dad was down the pit, his first job was looking after the pit ponies. But mining isn't like that anymore. To be honest it isn't even like man riders and ncb trepanners either. Hugely remote mechanised, wouldn't really need to get dirty anymore.

i wonder what modern mining restarted today would actually look like. seems a ripe area for full automation/robots . i imagine it would be possible to build something that would literally be able to dig itself out of any collapse and perhaps not even need traditional tunnel support structures.

[V8 Fettler]

MYOB said:

V8 Fettler said:

I'm old enough, thanks. Your subsequent post is probably wherever you left it.

It wasn't your age I was referring to.

Is this another one of your clandestine devil's advocate posts?

[Evanivitch]

Gary C said:

Your wrong on most points there I'm afraid.

They don't need to use open cast. Deep mines are well know tech, infact one is being sunk in the north east for potash and plenty of people are happy to work in it. People WERE paid good money to work in deep mines (my dad and my grandad were both miners) with good pensions.
The cost factor is not miners, it's us paying for the coal. Cheap imports stopped uk mines from making a profit, but again, costs. It would be cheaper than 100% wind (or nuclear)

We have the same infrastructure to distribute coal as we had during the height of coal generation (the railways)

And im sure, given the small foot print of a coal station, the major objection today to a new coal station would be the co2 emissions.

Who in the UK has been sinking deep mines to maintain the UK capability? If anyone is doing it then they'll be overseas contractors brought in for their expertise.

Anyone who thinks coal mining was well paid given the conditions, health impacts and hazards is lying. Several members of my family worked the South Wales pits, all called it an honest days work but none of them were considered well-off in their communities. I'm pretty sure most the people of Merthyr Tydfil today would take 2/3rds of the pay of a "well paid" miner if the alternative was to sit in an air-conditioned call centre.

Have you not noticed the reduction in railway lines?

You're right that coal stations have a small footprint, if you ignore the large, dusty coal pile that is required next to them...

[Ali G]

Well, good to see that Merthyr is thriving now - since the mining went

[Evanivitch]

Ali G said:

Well, good to see that Merthyr is thriving now - since the mining went

There's still coal mining in Merthyr.

[Ali G]

Evanivitch said:

Ali G said:

Well, good to see that Merthyr is thriving now - since the mining went

There's still coal mining in Merthyr.

Activists are trying to shut the open cast stuff down.

That includes you.

[V8 Fettler]

Paddy_N_Murphy said:

rolando said:

Evanivitch & Paddy

Were either of you around in the winter of 1973/74?

I doubt it, judging by your comments.

What the juddering fk has that got to do with anything? The Country, power consumption and infrastructure has no resemblance to the current, never mind the future.

Or are you the dinosaur?



The car of the Year was an Audi 80. is that comparable to a Peugeot 3008 ?

Nevermnd the Tesla's and Hybrids....



Anyway - you promised not to talk to me anymore.

Installed generating capacity has not changed much since the early 1970s, typically around 70GW. If we exclude unreliables on the basis that they're unreliable then we probably had more generating capacity in the early 1970s.

The national grid hasn't changed much since the early 1970s.

The Audi 80 would be interesting, Audi 100 from 1976 much more so. Pug 3008? No thanks.

[Ali G]

Group B rally cars.

Very fast - considered too fast.

Unsurpassed!

Is that a haiku?

[Evanivitch]

Ali G said:

Evanivitch said:

Ali G said:

Well, good to see that Merthyr is thriving now - since the mining went

There's still coal mining in Merthyr.

Activists are trying to shut the open cast stuff down.

That includes you.

Am I? Not sure I've ever expressed or acted on such an opinion.

In fact, I'm not suggesting we close the existing pit at all. But I certainly don't support new ones.