[HN Gopher] Britain's last coal-fired power plant shuts down
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       Britain's last coal-fired power plant shuts down
        
       Author : geox
       Score  : 30 points
       Date   : 2024-10-03 21:06 UTC (1 hours ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (www.theguardian.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (www.theguardian.com)
        
       | spamjavalin wrote:
       | Some unobjectionably good news, surely.
        
         | b800h wrote:
         | Just a shame that we're increasingly purchasing power from
         | abroad as we don't seem to be very good at building nuclear
         | power stations.
        
           | hermitcrab wrote:
           | Most things get cheaper as you build more of them. However,
           | those economies of scale never seem to kick in for nuclear as
           | a) we don't build enough of them and b) the safety are
           | requirements are always going up.
           | 
           | Sizewell C is being built by EDF, a French company. And it
           | seems that every time they go over-budget they hold their
           | hand out and the British Government coughs up some more. I
           | read that it is likely to cost in the region of PS40 billion.
        
         | Kognito wrote:
         | Bittersweet.
         | 
         | Glad to be moving away from coal, but the lack of serious
         | investment in anything but wind energy has left the UK with the
         | highest electricity prices in the developed world, factories
         | and industry closing their doors, the most vulnerable in
         | society choosing between heating or eating and a very real
         | prospect of blackouts this winter.
         | 
         | We dreamed of a future of energy abundance, almost too cheap to
         | meter. We have the technology in nuclear to do just that and
         | perhaps we will one day.
         | 
         | So celebrate Britain turning off 500MW of emergency buffer
         | supply and try your best to ignore the 50GW of coal power that
         | China brought online in the 12 months of 2023 alone.
        
         | hermitcrab wrote:
         | As long as we aren't just paying other people to mine/burn coal
         | instead.
        
         | ClassyJacket wrote:
         | Nah, people always spin this as "the horrible evil communist
         | government is killing 800 JOBS!!!". Happened in Australia a few
         | years ago - the parties on _both_ sides only spoke about it as
         | purely a negative thing because of loss of jobs, not a peep
         | about carbon emissions or other pollution.
        
       | red369 wrote:
       | Interesting XKCD comic on the amount of coal dug up in UK since
       | the industrial revolution:
       | 
       | https://xkcd.com/2992/
        
       | zamadatix wrote:
       | Conversion a month ago from the pending shutdown:
       | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41443347
        
         | gandalfian wrote:
         | and three days ago
         | https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41695587
        
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       (page generated 2024-10-03 23:00 UTC)