Engineering Developments are Mitigating Climate Change PART ONE By Norman Harris
Engineering in all sectors is a continuous process of development. Generally small and continuous improvements, but sometimes, a breakthrough.
uses. Coal stations are now on restricted use and will cease to operate at all in the next 2 or 3 years. Leaving a hundred years of coal in the ground and some areas of the UK still depressed and desolate.
W
The first white knight for electrical power generation was nuclear. But the high costs of construction and an emotional fear of what happens if something went wrong hampered their adoption. Everyone has heard of the Three Mile Island (1979), Chernobyl (1986), and Fukushima (2011) disasters. Fukushima should never have been built on a geological fault line, but the ensuing tsunami was unavoidable. This disaster making Germany decide to abandon nuclear and move to dependence on Russian gas, potentially dangerous politically and much to the justifiable chagrin of the US Government.
hen I first entered engineering, I took an interest in the generation of electrical power. My Mechanical World Yearbook of 1965 still had its bookmark in the pages recording the thermal efficiencies of coal Power Stations. Efficiencies were measured by division of the heat value of the coal put in and the heat value of the electricity produced. Efficiencies ranged from only 30% to 35%, with a league table of stations provided. All those station names have now disappeared into their local histories and most of the sites have moved on to other 108
LANCASHIRE & NORTH WEST MAGAZINE
www.lancmag.com
