coal!!!!!!!!

[sunflower68]

Can anyone tell me (and my dad) whatever happened to coal?  Why did the mines shut down (apart from the Thatcher govt of course.) Have we actually depleted all the resources?  Is anyone mining coal and why does nobody use it anymore?

[Stevie50001]

Probably due to the invention of cleaner energy sources like eg nuclear. Countries like France i believe totally rely on nuclear power for all thier needs, they probably had some coal run plants in the past. Also coal generated power is dirty, but i dont think the government would abandon it for that reason alone. I guess the extraction of the coal itself which was once a major industry just must have declined, and really we dont need coal in our daily lives anymore eg trains, fires etc. I'm not sure but i think i remeber seeing something about it being cheaper to import it rather than extract it here, which may explain somethings too? Quite an interesting question, never really thought about it - till now!

[bernardo]

It got to the point where employing somebody to mine and extract the coal became more expensive than the amount for which the coal could be sold, so there was no point in mining it any more.  Not all the reseources have been exhauusted, but it would not make economic sense to mine it in the UK when foreign coal is cheaper and available.

[BigDogsWang]

There are still thousands of homes across Britain with smoke bellowing out of chimneys, so someone must still be mining it.

[Sheriff]

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.

 

 

 

 

[Sheriff]

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.

 

 

 

 

[piccadilly]

There's only a handful of deep mines left, one in South Wales, one in Northumberland and i think one in Scotland, with a few left elsewhere.Some power stations still burn coal and steel works use it, but i think it is mainly now imported

[Bliggin]

Plus, its dirrrty!

[orac]

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! 

[smudge]

We have a beautiful Victorian fireplace & burn real coal in it. We wouldn't be without it, but if one day we could no longer buy coal, we'd just have to carry on with using logs.

[sammy snake]

Most places round here where I live are smokeless zones now so can't burn 'proper' coal.  Although maybe I'm just being thick and they  treat the coal with something to stop the smoke??

Incidently the area I'm from used to have dozens of coal mines in the early 1900's, now we have none.

 

 

[smudge]

That's very sad sammy - it makes me feel so sad thinking of the poor men & boy miners, who worked down in the mines in those very hard times.

[trilobite]

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,