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The UK's last coal plant will sigh out its final pollutants Monday before shutting down for good and officially ending the country's century and a half of coal production. Nottinghamshire's Ratcliffe-on-Soar plant was the last of its kind following Britain's 2015 commitment to close all coal power plants by 2025. Ratcliffe was originally scheduled to shut down in 2022 but stayed open after Russia invaded Ukraine and Europe entered a gas crisis.
The Ratcliffe plant once had 3,000 engineers but only employs 170 staff now. That group will gather to watch a livestream of the plant being turned off, and over 100 of them are set to work on decommissioning the plant over the next two years. Many of the other employees will enter new jobs at different power plants owned by Uniper, Raticliffe's German owner, while others will enter training programs to work on other aspects of the industry.
Britain opened the world's first coal power plant in 1882, London's Holborn Viaduct, with the help of Thomas Edison's Edison Electric Light Company. Coal has played a major part in the UK until very recently. According to a report from energy think tank Ember, coal was responsible for 39 percent of the UK's energy supply in 2012 but shrunk to just two percent in 2019. The decrease in coal production was reportedly equal to double the amount of all greenhouse gases used in the UK in 2023. Between 2012 and 2023, wind and solar generation also increased from six percent to a 34 percent share of the UK's energy. Britain still has a long way to go, but this step has made it the first G7 country to remove all coal power production.
(Score: 5, Insightful) by turgid on Thursday October 03, @02:25PM (8 children)
The problem with what Thatcher did was that she did it in a cruel and punitive way to break the trade unions. Unfortunately for us all, her ultra-free-market approach was incompatible with developing the new civillian nuclear power capacity that we needed and we ended up burning gas instead. She broke the British nuclear power industry too. With Thatcher, as with Reagan, it was all about ideology and sticking it to the "commies." She did such a great job that people of my generation were and still are extremely wary of unions. It's a shame, mine has done good things.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 2, Interesting) by PiMuNu on Thursday October 03, @03:24PM (6 children)
That's a bit of a one-sided explanation. The trade unions were doing their best to break the government and incited conflict. Random linky:
https://www.historyhit.com/when-the-lights-went-out-in-britain-the-story-of-the-three-day-working-week/ [historyhit.com]
Successive governments have continued to fail to build out UK nuclear (or other generating) capability, both conservatives and labour i.e. they're all rubbish and ducked the question until it was "too late".
(Score: 5, Interesting) by turgid on Thursday October 03, @03:43PM (5 children)
The three day working week was a decade earlier, in the 1970s. Thatcher set about the destruction of trade unionism and the Welfare State (the post-WW II social contract) because she was ideologically opposed. Other countries (e.g. Germany) have strong unions and have had a much more mature attitude, involving them in decisions for the common good and building a strong economy. They could hardly be called Communists. I was very young during the Miners Strike and I swallowed a lot of the anti-union propaganda. In fact, when I went into nuclear power, I almost didn't join the union (the Engineers and Managers Association) because of the propaganda I had grown up with. I joined, and was pleasantly surprised and am still a member to this day (it's now called Prospect).
UK governments have been very short-sighted since Thatcher on security of energy supply. It's a national security issue. They've made us dependent on greenhouse gas emitters (coal, oil, gas) and unreliable foreign sources. Thatcher pensioned off our nuclear experts. We used to know how to design and build them. Now we buy them from the French. A friend of mine still works in the industry.
Greenpeace and Friends of the Earth with their irresponsible scare-mongering regarding nuclear power have not helped. Ironically, thanks to their anti-nuclear propaganda, we ended up with governments too timid to invest in long-term nuclear base load and therefore burning oil and gas. The German Greens managed to get the entire German nuclear power industry shut down. As a result, the Germans had to import more electricity from France, generated by French PWRs and to mine and burn much more dirty coal.
You only get one life and I'm well into mine now, and seriously disappointed with how all this has turned out, despite my own little efforts. The world is crazy. Fortunately we don't live for ever. I don't want to be around in another hundred years when Climate Change and rampant right-wing authoritarianism have taken over. Sorry to be negative, but it's not looking good, is it?
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday October 04, @12:17AM
The real reason the Germans are mining coal : https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azEvfD4C6ow [youtube.com]
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Friday October 04, @05:51AM (3 children)
> decade earlier, in the 1970s
Maggie Thatcher took power in the 1970s.
> They could hardly be called Communists.
I entirely agree. You were the one who called the unions Communists!
> rampant right-wing authoritarianism have taken over
Well the UK has been bumping along on the middle ground for a couple of decades. David Cameron, Tony Blair, Keir Starmer are/were all pretty centerist. There was a few year blip with BoJo et alia but they only lasted about 5 years and, I believe, did considerable harm to the right wing arm of the tories.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday October 04, @11:51AM (2 children)
The point I was making was that the three day week was 73-74 and the miners strike was 83-84. Yes, Maggie got in in 79. The way the unions were portrayed in the press back in the 80s was that they were far-left radicals, essentially Communists. I knew a young Tory who told me that the Labour Party, strongly associated with many of the unions was Communist. I've read Alexei Sayle's memoirs in recent years. The Labour Party distanced itself from the Communists after Stalin came to power in Russia and oppressed and murdered millions of people.
In recent years the right had bandied about terms like "far left" and "undemocratic Marxists" and the creepy "cultural Marxism." They were even labelling Conservative Prime Minister Rishi Sunak a "socialist."
There's a lot of misinformation going about. It's more important than ever to do your research and to employ critical thinking skills.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Insightful) by PiMuNu on Friday October 04, @03:18PM (1 child)
Okay, I guess I don't subscribe to the argument that there was a strong discontinuity between the unions in 73-74 and the unions in 83. 10 years is a long time - but, to take a contemporary example, I don't think it is correct to suggest that the Tory party in 2014 (two years before Brexit) is so radically different from the Tory party in 2024. Cameron is out, but Boris Johnson is still a big figure. Nigel Farage is still a lurking evil.
I wasn't born in the 70s so my evidence is second hand!
Just to be explicit, I'm not trying to link the things that happened in 1980 with modern politics. I'm not claiming Rishi Sunak is a socialist, nor that the 1980s (or 70s) coal miners were communists. I'm just trying to put context into, and mitigate, your demonisation of Thatcher. As with all PMs, (and people who try to do things in general) she had to make some difficult decisions to try to keep the country moving.
Doing stuff is hard.
(Score: 2) by turgid on Friday October 04, @06:30PM
I don't think it is correct to suggest that the Tory party in 2014 (two years before Brexit) is so radically different from the Tory party in 2024.
It's very different. The hard-right ERG took over, essentially when Johnson became leader. There was a purge of the remaining One Nation moderates (Ken Clarke, Michael Heseltine, Anna Soubry, Dominic Grieve). They've been tacking further and further to the right to try to out-do Farage.
I'd bet money on the Conservative Party being taken over by Farage's Reform UK soon. We might have seen our last ever Conservative Prime Minister, and that was Rishi Sunak.
The ERG used to be a lunatic fringe group of Little Englanders. John Major (Conservative PM) famously referred to their predecessors as "bastards." Margaret Thatcher was apparently the architect of the EU Single Market. Despite their admiration for her, the ERG took us out of that Single Market.
Their current preoccupation is the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR). They want to take us out of it because it's "a foreign court" and we British should not be subject to the rule of Johnny Foreigner. This is despite us participating in its running. The ultimate irony is, their great hero Winston Churchill, was one of the primary architects of Human Rights and the ECHR.
These swivel-eyed loons have forgotten their history. They have forgotten how we got here. They have forgotten the horrors leading up to and including the Second World War.
All of these things they find so abhorrent, all this working together with our neighbours, was championed, designed and implemented by the very generation who had to suffer that horrific war, to ensure such things would never happen again. The NHS and the Welfare State also came out if it.
They are ignorant and blind. They are dragging us back into a Dickensian society. They are worse than fools. They are ideological zealots. They do not listen to reason.
I refuse to engage in a battle of wits with an unarmed opponent [wikipedia.org].
(Score: 4, Interesting) by janrinok on Thursday October 03, @04:24PM
I think we are of a similar generation, but I will admit to being perhaps a generation before yours. I am full of admiration for most unions.
However, during the coal miners' strike the involved unions did as much as they could to disrupt the entire country and wanted the Government to subsidise the mines that were uneconomic. That wasn't a good fiscal policy.
While the closure of the pits created terrible hardship for those whose livelihood depended upon them the UK has overcome those problems. Could successive governments have done better? Of course they could have.
I am not interested in knowing who people are or where they live. My interest starts and stops at our servers.