Chronic Health Ailments- How Do You...
Body & Soul3 mins ago
No best answer has yet been selected by sunflower68. Once a best answer has been selected, it will be shown here.
For more on marking an answer as the "Best Answer", please visit our FAQ.There is no reason for the mines closing down other than at the whim of the Thatcher government. Mrs T, god bless the evil witch, and her party suffered a highly humiliating defeat at the hands of the miners in the strike of the early 70's, this is something she clearly never forgot. When the opportunity arose to dish out some payback she did so in rather spectacular style by engineering the bitterest industrial dispute of the last century. And anyone who thinks it was a spontaneous dispute is sadly mistaken, our nations power stations had been stockpiling coal for months in preperation for the dispute, it was planned with a military precision down to the most minute detail.
The suggestion that the mines were closed because they were massively unproductive is also a gross misrepresentation of the facts. We couldn't produce per ton as cheap as South Africa, Russia & Poland for instance, simply because the workers in those country's were been exploited financially and exposed to horrendous safety conditions which our society would not tolerate. However, it didn't take a rocket scientist to realise that once our own productive capacity had been deminished the price would start to increase, which has now resulted in us having to buy in our coal far more expensively than we could produce it ourselves.
Sadly this is a resource that is now beyond our reach as once a mine is closed and capped it can never again be re-opened on safety grounds due to instability within the structures brought about by such factors as flooding. So now we can either continue to buy in expensive fuel from abroad, or exploit nuclear power, the real cash cow of energy production, when the answer to the problem is quite literally under our feet in abundance, but quite beyond our grasp.
There is no reason for the mines closing down other than at the whim of the Thatcher government. Mrs T, god bless the evil witch, and her party suffered a highly humiliating defeat at the hands of the miners in the strike of the early 70's, this is something she clearly never forgot. When the opportunity arose to dish out some payback she did so in rather spectacular style by engineering the bitterest industrial dispute of the last century. And anyone who thinks it was a spontaneous dispute is sadly mistaken, our nations power stations had been stockpiling coal for months in preperation for the dispute, it was planned with a military precision down to the most minute detail.
The suggestion that the mines were closed because they were massively unproductive is also a gross misrepresentation of the facts. We couldn't produce per ton as cheap as South Africa, Russia & Poland for instance, simply because the workers in those country's were been exploited financially and exposed to horrendous safety conditions which our society would not tolerate. However, it didn't take a rocket scientist to realise that once our own productive capacity had been deminished the price would start to increase, which has now resulted in us having to buy in our coal far more expensively than we could produce it ourselves.
Sadly this is a resource that is now beyond our reach as once a mine is closed and capped it can never again be re-opened on safety grounds due to instability within the structures brought about by such factors as flooding. So now we can either continue to buy in expensive fuel from abroad, or exploit nuclear power, the real cash cow of energy production, when the answer to the problem is quite literally under our feet in abundance, but quite beyond our grasp.
Coal is still a plenty in the UK. Though some coal was at the time cheaper than UK coal, the quality of the imported coal was far poorer than uk coal (somtething to do with the sulphur content I think). Some think (me included) that the closing of pits was largely a political move. Perhaps it was done to destroy a highly unionised workforce and to repay the difficulies they caused for Ted Heath's Government..Problem when shut pits, you sooon get a stage where reopening is prohibitively expensive. They were sold to few private individuals who continue to operate the mines by using Government subsidies in the form of tax breaks. Makes you laugh that the pro hunting lobby are banging on about rural job losees and affects on communities when hunting is banned. Don't remember them being too worried for miners. Thatcher's policy destoyed communities, divided families and created towns where the few ork and the rest claim. What's more, the "Dash for Gas" has locked the UK into an energy strategy that makes us dependant on imports from unstable parts of Russia.
I think that's what happened anyway!
Best Welsh anthracite is 'proper coal', sammy, it is considered a smokeless fuel and therefore suitable for burning in smoke-free zones without any processing.
It's the inferior quality steam coals and brown coals that are the 'dirty coals' and would need processing into smokeless fuels.
There are still enormous reserves of coal in the UK, but as bernado says, it's not economically viable to exploit them.
As for declining coal use? Firstly, the decline of industries using coal (eg the steel industry) and secondly, the decreasing use of coal for power generation - the preference now being for gas-fired power staions as they are seen as 'cleaner' or at least with respect to particulate and sulphur dioxide emissions,