UK's Coal Plants To Be Phased Out Within 10 Years (bbc.co.uk) 109
AmiMoJo writes: The UK's remaining coal-fired power stations will be shut by 2025, Energy Secretary Amber Rudd has announced. They will mostly be replaced with gas. Currently, coal provides 28% of the UK's electricity. Japanese/European nuclear plants built in the UK are also expected to contribute. The big question is how to ensure gas plants are built to replace it. Only one large plant is under construction today. Another, which secured a subsidy last year, is struggling to find investors. The government cut renewable energy subsidies earlier this year, which led to questions about the government's commitment to tackle climate change.
Who needs new plants? (Score:1)
We could just harness all the politicians hot air thats been produced about this over the last 15 years.
I'm really beginning to believe that technically pig ignorant people should not be in politics. It seems to me that they Just Dont Get that we're have hardly any spare capacity and closing another load of stations without any new ones to immediately replace them is only going to make things worse especially if we have another cold winter.
FFS , if they can't even formulate and carry out a sensibly policy f
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I'm left wondering why the fuck they want gas.
Presumably because gas power stations are far cleaner than coal, provide output that can be relied on (unlike wind or solar) and can be built quickly (unlike nuclear).
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More likely because their anti-nuke hysterics are as bad as our anti-nuke hysterics.
Just remember, the one thing that can turn an AGW fanatic into a proponent of coal is the thought that the easiest zero-CO2 replacement for a coal plant is a nuclear power plant....
Re:Three "blackout" warmings. None due to renewabl (Score:4, Insightful)
Except it isn't. While well managed nuclear at scale with current technology holds a lot of promise it requires a large amount of capital and quite a bit of infrastructure. The will to do that does not currently exist so whether we like it or not we'll have to wait for 1950s style prosperity before it is going to be given serious consideration - as China did recently.
To boil things right down, a windmill or two requires little effort or action on the part of people in politics while nukes would require actual work.
Are you getting the picture now? The question - "where is my network of power stations with GenIV reactors" can be filed with "where is my flying car" for now.
Pretence that it is easy is going to be met with various levels of disbelief by anyone with a clue.
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Wait, what? I thought there was no fracking in the UK? And Gitmo is a US thing. I don't think the UK sends people there, as a general rule?
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I also understand that they already have a thriving industry in extracting methane and fertilizer from all the bullshit that comes out of Parliament. They tried hooking up Buckingham Palace but found that the royals don't shit, they just hold it in until they fart a diamond once a year.
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That would explain the Queen's anal retentiveness.
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It's either that or risk shooting a corgi by accident.
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It seems to me that they Just Dont Get that we're have hardly any spare capacity and closing another load of stations without any new ones to immediately replace them is only going to make things worse especially if we have another cold winter. FFS , if they can't even formulate and carry out a sensibly policy for building basic infrastructure what fecking chance do we have if there's a real emergency?
Don't worry, they're not really going to turn off the plants by the due date. Some "emergency" will happen between now and then, and they'll be like: "Well, we can't close it down yet, because $EMERGENCY, but come election time everyone please remember that we really wanted to! We're pro-environment, in theory!"
That way they can have their coke and heat it too.
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"China and France are building the new plants."
Go and count how many cupcake, then get back to us.
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Yeah, and they've been guaranteed a spot price double the going rate, index linked to inflation. It makes even the greenest, tree-huggiest eco-energy platform look cheap.
Less about providing for our infrastructure and more about the nest-eggs of our politicians.
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UK government is a shambles (Score:4, Informative)
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See also housing policy (housing as investment over housing as shelter), manufacturing policy (service industry, particularly banking is all the Tories care about), health policy (privatise the NHS piece by piece, selling it off to their party donors).
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What makes you think this is a trait unique to the UK government?
Thanks! XOXO, Putin (Score:2)
Dear Comrades...er...Customers,
Thanks for ditching your remaining coal plants.
Now that you threw those pesky Ukrainians under the bus, we can now offer our natural gas without problems. I will love to sell more to you by 2025 and later.
From Russia, with love.
Putin
XOXO
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I don't see what the fuss is all about! Relations between the East and West have never been better. The UK, and large parts of Europe will be dependent on Russian Gas for many many years, which is fine. I don't have a problem with that. The hundreds of years of supply of Coal reserves that the UK has should stay in the ground where it belongs. All UK citizens are totally happy to two or three times more for their power.
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The UK doesn't buy gas from Russia:
http://www.ukoog.org.uk/knowle... [ukoog.org.uk]
Our coal however does come from Russia (and Colombia and the US) though, not Ukraine:
http://www.carbonbrief.org/gas... [carbonbrief.org]
So here we've clearly got a policy that actually decreases dependency on Russia, not the contrary as you're claiming.
If the UK ends up fracking then between that and a ramping back up of North Sea gas production (or even Falklands gas extraction) the UK could easily become energy independent for quite some time.
Which isn't t
Actually it's Chinese nuclear power stations (Score:2)
From the summary:
Japanese/European nuclear plants built in the UK are also expected to contribute
No, we're getting Chinese [bbc.co.uk] ones. I think our politicians must be among the most easily bought.
Where is the gas going to come from? (Score:2)
Russia is not a reliable supplier. Shipping gas across the Atlantic is costly or at least undeveloped. Fracking has not taken root in Europe So, where is all that natural gas priced to be cost effect for power generation going to come from?
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Our government are imagining it will come from fracking ; they've already passed laws that make it legal to frack under any land (regardless of it's ownership), and use any fracking fluid, and keep it a secret as to what is being used.
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Re 'So, where is all that natural gas pri
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"Russia is fine provider. Soviet Union or Russia have kept contracts as signed over the terms and time of the contract, built pipelines into the West as planned and agreed on. Russian gas flowed as expected, offered and paid for. If your nation stops paying mid contract or takes gas in transit, contract is recreated to reflect new costs or currency changes. Russia is not difficult to deal with for a gas pipeline contract. Price is set, product flows as paid for."
So how much does the Kremlin pay you to spout
Nuclear fission costs 10-20 x more than solar/wind (Score:2)
But, hey, that's just economics.
Cameron is a pig.
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The design, build costs, running costs, decontamination, decommissioning cost all get covered by the UK with profit making for all the owners and services provided over the life of a nuclear project.
Gas extraction from Coal .. (Score:2)
"Under the North Sea there are vast deposits. We're talking about two billion tonnes of coal off the coast here. Now, to give you some measure of that, two billion tonnes has more energy in it than we've ever extracted from the totality of North Sea gas since we began." link [bbc.co.uk]
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Yeah, that damn liberal Conservative party. They'll be the ruin of this country, I tell you.
Do your bloody homework!
--JG
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Yeah, that damn liberal Conservative party. They'll be the ruin of this country, I tell you.
Do your bloody homework!
--JG
Careful. You don't understand the mind of the American bubble person. Disagree with him again, and he'll be calling for attacks on London to win the hearts and minds of the British people.
And completely ignoring the efforts of getting the coal to the generating stations is showing his ignorance. It gets a little harder to extract these days, and it isn't like oil, where you have a hole in the ground. You remove entire mountaintops and dump the fill in the next valley over . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/. [wikipedia.org]
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"he'll be calling for attacks on London"
Nah, not enough oil there.
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"he'll be calling for attacks on London"
Nah, not enough oil there.
Cymbal crash!
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The UK Conservative Party wants a higher nationwide "Living Wage" [telegraph.co.uk]...so it ends up being on the liberal side of the US spectrum.
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They stole the name "Living Wage" from the ... Living Wage Foundation, a charity. Then redefined it as somewhat less than what is agreed to be a living wage. Just another bit of doublespeak.
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Yes, the British Conservative Party are such mindless Liberals, aren't they?
Re:Typical Liberal Thinking (Score:4, Insightful)
Natural gas is a stopgap -- and a highly useful one. I would compare natural gas to a hybrid car, like a Prius. It still burns petroleum fuel, but not as much, and it still pollutes, but not as much, and it can help fill the gap until pure battery electric cars are perfected and take off.
In the case of natural gas power plants. . . For now, they're much better than coal. For the future, solar power and nuclear fusion will eventually kill them off.
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In the case of natural gas power plants. . . For now, they're much better than coal. For the future, solar power and nuclear fusion will eventually kill them off.
If we ever get fusion to work effectively it might end up killing everything off. But in the moderate term, solar isn't going to be the only one. A combination of nuclear fission, solar, wind, geothermal and hydroelectric is much more viable and solves many of the problems. Fusion is a very long way off and it is likely that we'll stop having susbstantial fossil fuel use well before fusion is a common power source.
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Monocultures in power generation are a very bad idea.
I've run into that even with a power station sited next to a large coal mine - those things still need a lot of available water for cooling and a drought resulted in having to get a water pipeline built quickly before the dam ran dry. With no hydro, wind or anything else to fall back on the state would have been down a couple of GW in the middle of summer with no adequate connection at the time to the national grid (or
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Wishful thinking. Natural gas has a couple of big advantages over nuclear (both fusion and fission):
1. They can scale down and provide peaking capacity, quickly brought online when renewable energy is down.
2. It really isn't a bit cleaner than coal, it is a LOT cleaner than coal.
3. People don't turn into full retards when discussing the safety of natural gas.
Re:Typical Liberal Thinking (Score:4, Insightful)
Read the bloody article.
The first hint that this isn't purely about "liberal demoncrap" is that it is filed under business, not environment. The second hint is that they're talking about aging plants that won't be shut down if they are upgraded with carbon capture. It is also possible that other upgrades or maintenance is necessary, but unmentioned. In other words, cost is a factor here. The third hint are mentions of economic and political issues, such as energy security.
There are other subtle (as in subtle as being hit by a sledgehammer) issues being mentioned, none of which indicate that environmental considerations are secondary issues.
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"none of which" should read "all of which"
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Read the bloody article.
The first hint that this isn't purely about "liberal demoncrap" is that it is filed under business, not environment. The second hint is that they're talking about aging plants that won't be shut down if they are upgraded with carbon capture. It is also possible that other upgrades or maintenance is necessary, but unmentioned. In other words, cost is a factor here. The third hint are mentions of economic and political issues, such as energy security.
There are other subtle (as in subtle as being hit by a sledgehammer) issues being mentioned, none of which indicate that environmental considerations are secondary issues.
There are two big problems with your argument-
1. Nobody has demonstrated carbon capture using the full exhaust stream. Typically they extract carbon from only 1 to 10% of the exhaust gasses. The reason is because the amount of carbon is large, and the parasitic losses from even a partial treatment system make the plant uneconomical. These projects are just good enough to attract government subsidies and grants. A full scale system would never be economically viable in most countries.
2. Nobody is goi
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Why phase it out?
Because coal is filthy.
Is it more expensive than the alternatives?
No, coal is cheap, at least in many areas.
Is the coal going to be used for something else?
It will remain as a non-rigid filler under the ground where it had been.
Are modern coal plants really all that harmful to the environment?
Yes. Not as bad as old ones without scrubbers and other filters on the smoke, but they're still horribly messy. CO2 is not the only waste product, sulfurs, toxic heavy metals, and trace radioactive materials get burned in those plants and sent out with the ash.
The only power source I am aware of that rivals coal for filthiness (even with current expensive top-tier filter
Re:Typical Liberal Thinking (Score:5, Informative)
Coal is worse than gas no matter how you look at it. Mining operations, shipping it around the world, and even with modern plants that have carbon capture it's still just about the most damaging option. And yes, since we have an NHS, they are very expensive.
Note that the Liberals that you hate so much helped get new nuclear plants built in the UK, even if they are designed by a Japanese company, built by the Chinese and owned by the French.
There are lots of reasons to dislike the Lib Dems, but your second paragraph is just right-wing ranting, only fit for the Daily Mail.
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helped get new nuclear plants built in the UK
And guaranteed them a spot price double the going rate. They're only interested in helping taxpayers money into the pockets of those who can bribe them.
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The going rate in the UK for unpredictable and variable onshore wind generation, guaranteed by law, is about £95 per MWhr or a little over the asking price for new baseload nuclear. Offshore wind in the UK is guaranteed about £145 per MWhr. The folks planning to build new nuclear plants in the UK simply want price parity with the other non-carbon generators. At least one large offshore wind project was recently cancelled because £145 per MWhr wasn't thought to be enough return for the cons
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That said, the contract for difference method of subsidy has the advantage that there is no up-front cost for the taxpayer; the taxpayer only pays based upon performance. The CfD expiry date is scheduled 35 years from the date of expected start of
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The worrying thing is that, as you say, there are several competing consortia which is good for competition but it will probably mean the UK will end up with a range of different reactor designs rather than one or two standard models. This will cause problems for fuel manufacture, operations, staff training, ancillary equipment procurement and so on.
The existing French reactor fleet is mostly a standardised M910 design with some tweaks here and there -- they're in the process of replacing a lot of steam gen
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Coal baseload power in Australia is about $25MWhr or about £12.
A major problem with shutting down coal plants in Australia is that the coal plant operators are the ones paying to protect the coal from fires. If they stop paying, it will catch fire and burn. There is a coal fire north of Sydney that has been burring for about 6,000 years. Not using the coal doesn't mean it isn't going to burn and it is much cleaner to burn it in a coal plant than in a coal seam fire.
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Actually the £92.50 is guaranteed for the entire lifetime of the plant, and will never go below that (but could potentially go up). That was a requirement to get the deal in place for the Chinese to build the plant and the French to operate it.
The costs for wind are expected to fall. While individual installations will get that price for their lifetime, the point is to develop the technology so that future farms will be more competitive. In fact, new on-shore wind is already cheaper than nuclear
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Who the fuck do you think will be paying for the electricity from this power station?
Industries, folks on low income who don't pay taxes, Irish people (via one of the interconnectors that feeds British electricity to Ireland) and regular consumers here in the UK. The construction and operating costs don't come out of taxes so "taxpayers" don't have any financial skin in the game.
Re:Typical Liberal Thinking (Score:5, Insightful)
There's lots of reasons to dislike all of the parties.
Thing is though now that the Tories have shed the lib dems, they are showing their true face and engaging in a massive slash and burn spree. I'd say the lib dems were the most under rated party I've ever seen in power.
To all the defectors who pissed and moaned because the coalition didn't behave like perfect lin dems (no shit, they were the minor party): congratulations, you've now got the government you deserve.
Trouble is of course, the rest of us are also stuck with the government they deserve.
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What really upset me was that they formed a government with the Tories in the first place. Ideologically they are far closer to Labour, and could have built a working coalition with them. A minority government was even an option. Instead they enabled the Tories.
Sure, it would have been worse if it was a Tory majority government like it is now, but that was never on the table. They saw an opportunity to get some power and seized it, and got screwed in the process.
Re:Typical Liberal Thinking (Score:4, Insightful)
What really upset me was that they formed a government with the Tories in the first place. Ideologically they are far closer to Labour, and could have built a working coalition with them. A minority government was even an option. Instead they enabled the Tories.
I don't know how anybody can think this: the maths weren't there. They could form a stable coalition with the Tories, or cobble together a highly fractured coalition with almost everybody that wasn't the Tories, the so-called "rainbow coalition". It would have seemed hugely undemocratic, and allowed a clearly voted-out Prime Minister to stay on. A minority coalition would have lasted 5 minutes - it would have to agree internally and *then* try to find agreements with other parties.
The LibDems are closer to Labour, but they had very little choice. To stay out of coalition would have led to a minority Conservative government that wouldn't have to last long, just long enough for another election when the polls swung slightly their way.
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They had plenty of choices. They could have got a much better deal from the Tories. They could have stuck to their principals and demanded a rainbow coalition of consensus rule. They could have at least demanded a proper electoral reform programme and referendum. No one forced them to do a really bad deal with the devil. They were supposed to be principled, after all.
Note that Brown announced he would step down by September before serious negotiations between Labour and the Lib Dems began, meaning that the
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They demanded plenty, and were a minority partner. You don't get to dictate every piece of policy in that position. At the time the consensus was that they got more than expected. They were hugely naive and let the Tories manipulate the next 5 years away from them, but at the time, they got more than most people thought they would.
If the negotiations had failed then absolutely we would have had a majority Tory government in a second general election within a few months, Labour were hugely unpopular.
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What really upset me was that they formed a government with the Tories in the first place.
Honestly if they'd have gone with Labour I would have not voted for them in a VERY long time. Labour had been in power for ages and was full of rotten corruption. Note also, that it was "new labour" which were ideologically identical to the Tories anyway.
Given quite how unpopular Gordon brown and the Blairites were, I don't think it's unreasonable to say that there would have been some serious riots if Labour even had
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You make it sound like Labour was some small minority fringe party. In fact they only got 5% less than the Tories, and 6% more than the Lib Dems. That's how screwed up our system is. A combined Labour/Lib Dem coalition would have taken over 50% of the votes, if not the seats.
I'm not a huge Labour fan either, but they would have been infinitely preferable to the Tories. They may have adopted much of the same ideology, but they aren't nearly as nasty.
The coalition did a terrible job. Labour was hobbled by hav
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OK, bear in mind I'm not supporting any particular party. As far as I'm concerned they're all hateful in a rich and interesting variety of ways.
You make it sound like Labour was some small minority fringe party.
No, I don't mean to. But you're referring t ovotes cast, which is only about 50% of the country. It'd fashionable to discount the un-cast votes, but to do so ignores that a large number are due to disaffection the part of the voters.
I live in a Labour stronghold. It will never be anything else. What'
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I agree, for many people voting is pointless. I'm not sure what your point is though, in relation to this debate.
As for deregulating the banks, yeah that was a mistake. But it was the legacy of Thatcherism and they pretty much had to do it to get elected and stay in power. I'm not trying to make excuses for them, I'm just pointing out that it's more the fault of the British electorate who mandated the irresponsibility that lead to the crash, and that the other lot would have done the same or worse.
Nuts as t
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Nuts as the Blairites were, they were not nasty like the Tories are.
I agree: the tories do have a very nasty streak. Of course it was the blairites who went to war in the face of the largest ever public protest based on fabricated evidence. Oh that and putting a tax on charities.
They didn't spout all the "us and them", poor hating rhetoric. While as you point out the Blairites were at times highly incompetent, motives matter. I think they were genuinely trying to improve the NHS with PPP deals, where as th
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"Coal is worse than gas no matter how you look at it."
Except for fracked gas which has a habit of leaking, and with methane being a far more potent greenhouse gas, natural gas can actually be worse.
Satellite image shows massive gas leaks on this page:
Life around New Mexico's gas wells: how fracking is turning the air foul | Environment | The Guardian [theguardian.com]
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Have you ever seen wolves eat? They'll eat - only to vomit the food up later. They eat it because they don't want someone else to get it. I believe this is where the "wolf down" turn of phase comes from.
The person you replied to? They're like that wolf. The idea that the resource is going to sit in the ground, perhaps used by a needy later generation or simply keeping carbon sequestered, is abominable. They want to consume it, they want it for themselves - even if it means they'll simply vomit it up later.
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Yes, coal scrubbers are a "solved problem", and that's why we don't have acid rain killing the forests anymore.
However, CO2 sequestration is not a solved problem, and we still have global warming.
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Why phase it out? Is it more expensive than the alternatives? Is the coal going to be used for something else? Are modern coal plants really all that harmful to the environment? I thought they were able to capture the emissions at these big plants.
None of these questions enter into the "mind" of the liberal demoncrap. They are only concerned with making things more expensive and shouting you down for employing basic logic and asking simple questions which expose their positions for the lunacy that they are.
Maybe the problem is in the way the questions are asked? Maybe a better approach would be to show that a coal fired plant can be retrofitted to release no more emissions than a natural gas fired plant for 1/4 the cost. If tax dollars are limited, wouldn't it make more sense to retrofit four plants for the cost of one new plant? Then the savings could be used for other programs.
Put differently, if my utility bills for my house are too high, I just add more insulation, I don't build a new house.
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If tax dollars are limited,
Tax dollars are indeed very limited in UK. Sometimes I wonder if you guys read further than subject line; in UK, we use Pounds for legal tender, our government is formed by the Conservative party, the Liberal Democrats are no longer in coalition government with them, and they would probably have been against these short-sighted plans to more or less abandon renewable energy and go for gas instead.
Just out of curiousity - is 'liberal' now the new 'communist' - ie. a word used as a derogatory epithet with no
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If tax dollars are limited,
Tax dollars are indeed very limited in UK. Sometimes I wonder if you guys read further than subject line; in UK, we use Pounds for legal tender, our government is formed by the Conservative party, the Liberal Democrats are no longer in coalition government with them, and they would probably have been against these short-sighted plans to more or less abandon renewable energy and go for gas instead.
Just out of curiousity - is 'liberal' now the new 'communist' - ie. a word used as a derogatory epithet with no trace of understanding of what the word actually means?
It sounds like both sides of the Atlantic have bought into what's good for business is good for the people. What's the saying -- those who fail to study history are doomed to repeat it -- or something like that? We've been down this path before and will suffer the same consequences before things normalize. But hey, at least on your side of the pond, the trains run on time!
Well, as you might have guessed, I'm from the other side of the pond and while I know that the UK uses pounds, tax pounds sounds awkwa
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With regards to liberal being the new communist or at least socialist, well, it's been that way on this side of the pond for quite awhile
I hear what you're saying, mate, and it looks like we agree on many things. It's a strange, strange world we've made for ourselves and our children.
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Chemistry gets in the way. There's a lot more CO and CO2 from burning coal and stopping that getting into the air has not been cheap so far so the "retrofitting" has not yet turned out to be cheaper than new gas turbines.
Not scrubbers, something new instead (Score:2)
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Where's your logic? Why ask a bunch of rhetorical questions when you could look up the answers yourself in five minutes? Maybe because you don't really want to hear the answers. . .
Coal is the dirtiest and most lethal power source by many measures. Yes, we've introduced a lot of environment and safety regulations on coal mining. Yes, we've put scrubbers in the smokestacks and largely gotten rid of acid rain. Coal is much better than it used to be -- but it's still the worst, by far, when compared with
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CO2 sequestration is a "look over there!" solution. The energy costs in capturing, compressing, and transporting CO2 are huge, and where do you put the CO2 anyway? Few rock formations are suitable for permanent storage of CO2, and those that are suitable are rarely located near coal plants. As far as I know there's only one carbon capture operation running, and that one is only commercially viable because it's conveniently located near a bunch of oil wells that need the CO2 to push oil up out of the ground.
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There's a few around the world, one in my state is at a tiny 30MW unit from the 1960s.
A massive effort to plant hedges to break up airflow on large plains and deter tornadoes would tie up far more CO2 than sequestration ever would, as would other thing
Responding to a below average AC post (Score:2)
Are modern coal plants really all that harmful to the environment?
Yes. Perhaps you've heard of climate change?
I thought they were able to capture the emissions at these big plants.
The cost of carbon capture for coal plants makes the operation far more expensive (per MWh and per MW) than nuclear or renewables. As a result, a tiny fraction of one percent of coal-fired generators in first world nations are capturing the carbon emissions and sequestering them.
As for your second paragraph -- it's one thing to be ignorant of a specific industry and its technologies and economics. That's your first paragraph, and that's fine. That's how we learn.
Re:Typical Reality-Based Thinking (Score:2)
Given the decline of coal usage in the U.K. (on a downwards slope since a now somewhat rusted lady held power, though plateaued of late) and that the U.K. has been a net importer of coal over a similar period of time, phasing out old coal plants may be something of a no-brainer. Granted, the U.K. is now also a net importer of gas, and a net importer of oil, but those declines are much more recent than that of coal. It will be interesting to see, moving forward, how the British economy pays to import those r
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Bit of a downside to changing from a manufacturing economy to a service economy and telling the Scots to go fuck themselves isn't it? The legacy of Thatcher still has not been repaired.
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> Are modern coal plants really all that harmful to the environment?
Yes, they really are all that harmful to the environment. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
In comparison, gas is squeaky clean. Less CO2, virtually no fly ash, etc.
> I thought they were able to capture the emissions at these big plants.
Nope. Carbon capture and storage (CCS) is still a long ways off from being practical, if it can ever become practical. They can capture fly ash but where does it go? They usually just dump it all in a
Mod parent down as typical idiot thinking (Score:2)
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China has been moving to bag
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None of the plants scrub everything (save CO2). Even the coming lead/mercury clean up will leave something like 5-10%. The reason is that removing 100% post burn is VERY expensive.
About the only way to clean it all up, is to convert the coal to methane, and clean it up at that time. [greatpointenergy.com] The problem with that, is it is more expensive than nat gas in America. OTOH, it actually makes great sense over in Europe. With this approach, they could quickly cut their energy imports esp. from Russia.
Intere
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Coal gasification has been done a bit over the years but to date it's actually had worse pollution problems probably due to nothing more than a lack of care.
Americans tend to focus on mercury in coal and tend to forget that it's a fairly rare thing and there just happens to be some large US coal deposits in locations with a lot
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Now, I keep viewing coal because that 'waste' product is a large amount of elements that if separated from the (CH*)* suddenly becomes useful, esp. when you have cheap high temps. But burning coal the way that we do and cleaning up on the back-end is VERY expensive. The reason is that post-burn clean-up does a really lousy job.
finally, nearly all coal has M
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No.
Ten percent of anything that does not burn is considered a lot for coal - so no "large amounts" of anything else and most of the ash is usually silicates. As for mercury look at what I've written above. It's not a common thing, but in areas where it is found it can also end up in coal. I've never seen it in ash when I've been looking for other elements (using spectroscopy gives you lines for each element present) because the coals
I should add (Score:2)
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I see much evidence that major governments -- and major environmental groups -- don't really take global warming seriously and don't really want the problem solved. You can judge them by their actions.
If they really took it seriously, the environmental groups would all be backing nuclear power instead of fighting it.
If the US government took global warming seriously, they'd allow new reactor designs instead of forcing companies to go build in China because they have given up on ever getting anything approv
Re: (Score:2)
We should be completly replacing fossil fuels of all kinds in electricity generation. Replacing power plants that run on coal with power plants that run on coal gas is like re-arranging the deckchairs on the Titanic, it doesn't do a thing to stop climate change.
We should be replacing the fossil fuel with modern safe generation IV nuclear reactor designs (that includes breeder reactors and spent-fuel reprocessing to reduce the amount of waste that we have to store at the end of it all), solar thermal plants,