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I am posting this today as I shall be away from tomorrow till Monday

Friday marks the day when the last Nottinghamshire colliery closes for good.

This will mark the end of deep mined coal in the county & the end to an industry that employed thousands of men & thousands of others in allied industries.

RIP Thoresby colliery

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Absolutely scandalous. More imports.

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And "foreign" coal is generally of poorer quality than "home" produced coal.

Our coal industry was MURDERED for political reasons. ( I may get moderated for saying that ;))

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RIP the Coal industry, had 22 years down the pit and at least I got a pension out of it and a lot of tales to tell

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Once Big K closes this month, that's it, no more deep mined coal in the UK. Hatfield closed a week back, unable to produce coal to keep it in the black...Coal is around $45 a ton on the spot market at present, Hatfield couldn't cut coal for that. They were told to stop cutting coal, clear the pit. By the end of the week shafts were starting to be filled in, all equipment left!!

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Bubblewrap, I think you are absolutely spot on in your analysis in post #3

There were a lot of bad decisions along the way, all the money wasted on the Selby and Vale of Belvoir coalfields which came to nothing.

The millions spent on installing bunker loading facilities for merry-go-round trains at many pits which closed soon after.

But that was management so it was all right, nothing was said.

But what an absolute tragedy that this once mighty industry is soon to be extinct in Britain.

I worked at Pye Hill for a short time in the 1970s and although I decided it wasn't for me, I'll be proud to my dying day that I did it and I was part of it.

R.I.P Indeed.

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You can't compete with some of the Australian and US collieries, try 48,000 tons a day from one face with just a small number of men!! Norways only colliery is now being fitted out with a remotely operated longwall, colliery in Queensland Australia also will be a testing ground for a Joy ROLF. Something the old NCB could only dream of!!

I served my elec apprenticeship with the NCB in the 60's, worked in the NSW coalfield, we were working 14 feet seams, hardly any faults, almost perfect geological conditions. L/W I worked on cut 48,000 a week on five days, three 7 hour production shifts. Same pit is now on care and maintenance, but was cutting 2.5 million tonnes a year until the end of last year with less than 320 total manpower, offices/surface and underground. How can any UK pit come even close??

There are now two longwall top cave in (LWTC) faces in Australia, these are seams 20 feet to 50 feet, they take the whole seam in one cut, two AFC's, one in the goaf, with special shields.

In China they have several LWTC faces operating in very thick seams.

Faces longer than 400 yards, shearer moving at a fast walking pace, these were the NCB's dream!!

OMS measured in tens of tons.

Due to conditions British collieries were labour intensive, conditions just didn't favour the heavy face equipment now in use, and besides, who wants to see surface subsidence measured in feet!!!! These faces move so rapidly that within a few days it's possible to see on the surface where they have cut.

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Whatever happened to 'clean-burn' coal ?

If there's one thing we still have lots of it's coal. AND we still have power stations using it - with all the infrastructure already there.

Wind power isn't going to fulfil our needs.

Nuclear is going to be expensive (if EDF have got anything to do with it).

If they had developed the technology like they said they were going to, then they wouldn't have had to shut down perfectly usable, reliable power stations because they didn't meet EU regulations.

Every time I go past Ratcliffe it's working full tilt. (I know some of it is gas, but mainly it's coal powered).

It looks very much as though they are running it into the ground because it's a high capacity, reliable station and they've shut all of the other ones in the area.

I read somewhere that Ratcliffe have a working sulphur dioxide removal system, so wouldn't make sense to use coal mined locally ?

I'm guessing that with the closure of Thoresby, they will be using imported coal ?

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Most is deep mined, but they tend to drive drifts down to the seam and have one shaft for ventilation purposes, both collieries I worked at had two drifts and one shaft, all coal comes to the surface via high speed belts.

One colliery in Queensland was producing 8 million tonnes of coal a year from ONE longwall face. Their major problem was the rail link to the coast couldn't keep up with them!! A problem with the transport contract they had from when they opened the mine.

A point, these modern faces cost a fortune, upwards of $3million or more.

The machines I maintained, 500HP shearer, weighed 30 tonnes, made the ones I trained on in the 60's look like toys, now machines are in the 1000HP range, are powered by high voltage 3300 volts, face conveyors are way larger than what we used with the NCB, faces two to three times as long, and seams way thicker than found in the UK.

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We've discussed this many times on mining forums, sure the NUM was a thorn in the governments side, but even had the miners won the strike of 84/5 how many pits would still be open???

Even die hard pitmen agree...NONE.

The uk coal industry would have to have been heavily subsidised today. Coal prices went through the roof a few years back, metalurgical coal was at a premium, around $400 a tonne, steam coal was around $250 a tonne, both are way down now, that's what killed Hatfield, prices dropped to $45 a tonne, Hatfield couldn't cut coal at that price, hence the phone call to the face, stop cutting, withdraw all men, we are done.

Ironically, it's what Britain gave the world that killed it's own coal industry off, namely the longwall face and the Anderton power loader. Both are highly efficient in almost perfect geological conditions.

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That was really interesting.

Great to get an insight from someone who knows the subject.

The price of imported coal must be incredibly cheap if it's better to transport it all that way - than use stuff that's mined locally.

Or is it simply the fact that coal itself is becoming uneconomic ?

Hard to get definitive answers.

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Last colliery I worked at was in Australia, Angus Place in NSW's western coalfield, it was the first Australian colliery to operate a successful longwall face, all British machinery designed for NSW mining conditions. ie a very thick sandstone roof.

I started there not long after LW5 had started, we were delivering the coal to the power station stockpile for $A13 a tonne, it was the cheapest coal in the world back then!! IF, we'd had trunk conveyors rated at 1000 tonnes per hour instead of 600 tonnes per hour, we could have run that face flat out and probably dropped our price to around $A8 a tonne delivered and still made a profit!!

That was 1982.

When I was serving my elec apprenticeship with the NCB, face teams were on contracts, they got paid by what they cut, no bonus either. There were around 22 miners, two shotfirers, one Deputy and one Overman, those four men were mine officials. One electrician, who did the mechanical work under a scheme called Mech/Elec Scheme, then one machine oiler, one reg11 chock fitter, (semi skilled so authorised under the M&Q Act Regulation 11 Elecs and Mecs rules. Plus a man at the maingate who was called the switchman.

NSW longwall face...one Deputy, one electrician, one fitter, two shearer drivers, one for each end, one man chocking, one man pushing over, one spare man and one man at the gate end...... See the difference???

Also, we were retreat mining against most UK pits advancing, which is much more efficient. All the prep work was done by one team of development workers, one continuous miner driver, two shuttlecar drivers, three men for bolting the roof and sides as we advanced, one elec, one fitter and one Deputy.

Developing a UK face when I was there in the 60's took around five to six men, plus an electrician, fitter and a Deputy and shotfirer.

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The overheads in mining are tremendous, Insurance must be sky high, Boulby mine in North Yorks has a 7000HP winder, I'm sure when I worked there in the mid to late 70's one wind cost 50 pounds worth of electricity, then the elec to run all the other machinery underground, two 1350HP fans, continuous miners.

Roadway maintenance, pumping water out the mine, shaft maintenance, machinery maintenance.

Then the biggest cost wages!

A large continuous miner will set you back a cool million bucks, a shearer 5-10 million bucks these days, one powered roof support, anywhere between $250,000 to $300,000 and you will need at least 200 of those on a standard face. Armoured Face conveyor plus beam stageloader about $1,000,000, trailing cables and armoured supply cables, transformers and switchgear, say $2,000,000.

So you're looking at at least six months or more before seeing ANY profit.

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That's what we refer to my mining forum as LOL

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Coal = coal mines = NUM thats why the Tories closed the mines down in the first place. noblue

You can peddle that line for as long as you like mate, but Ayupmeducks has posted the real reasons.

I've always maintained that there was a quiet sigh of relief amongst the more pragmatic and less hide-bound members of the Labour party when the pit closures programme started; because they knew deep in their hearts that it was inevitable, but that Labour could never do it. Hence, for all Bliar's rhetoric and waffle, not a single mine was ever re-opened, nor any attempt made to re-nationalise what remained of the industry.

I fully acknowledge that the way the mines were closed was brutal; but it had to happen.

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It was the Clean Air Act first instigated in London in the late 50's or early 60's I believe that started the death knell for the pits.

However, the shutdown certainly was hastened under Maggie, who saw it as a perfect way to crush the unions as Scriv so rightly says.

Sad but inevitable.

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If it hadn't have happened in the 80's and 90's, it would be happening right now $45 a tonne was way below what British pits could operate under, I wonder how the last couple of German Collieries are coping???

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Just a point. I looked at a list of all mine closures at a miner's welfare once and checked the dates. Whilst the different sizes of mines mean it doesn't necessarily reflect number of miners jobs lost, it quickly added up to the fact that more mines closed under Labour administrations than Conservative. Not what I expected given the way people portray only one party as being mine closers.

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That's correct, loads closed in the 60's, Nottingham alone lost Radford, Wollaton Bestwood and Clifton.. Many in Durham and the North East, Scotland and Lancashire were closed under a labour government, even Robens admitted he should have been allowed to close more while he had the NUM backing him. That was under Harold Wilson.

I might add, Clifton hadn't worked it's reserves out either, although the last coal was considered poor quality, plans were underway to go for the Ashgate seam, a good quality steam raising coal.

Development work had started at what would have been the top of the drifts going down to that seam, plans were to drive a drift from the surface to the inbye bunker, add a new washery and screening plant on the surface, drive 41's main gate through to Cotgrave as an emergency egress and a possible route for Cotgraves coal to be hauled up a drift instead of their shaft.

What life would Clifton have had??? We were told 50 years at the present rate of extraction, but looking back, I'd say 25-30 years as drifts shorten the life of a mine.

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The only thing we will need coal for in the future will be to smelt iron ore. I see the future in cold fusion for electricity generation.

A Professor of elec eng wrote a good paper, fair enough, it was written with the US grid system in mind, but could be applied anywhere. As he said, our grids are too outdated and too vulnerable to weather and intentional terrorism.

He see's the day when small towns and communities generate their own electricity within a small grid system, export surplus power via a smaller national grid system.

That way, if one part fails, only a few hundred people lose power, unlike now if the grid fails, millions lose power.

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