Fuel Poverty.

How many of you have checked the tariff that you pay for electricity?
A recent conversation with the SSE call centre, I raised the cost of electricity and the young girl asked if I had night storage heaters? The answer no, I have gas central heating.
Why are you on economy seven?my reply was always have been.
She then said lets see what we can do, result is I am now on a standard tariff saving over 8p per KWH.
If you are on economy 7 your pay more for your day rate so that you can have a cheap night rate.
If you are not a big consumer of electricty at night investigate the potential savings by swapping to the standard day rate.
Vic

The commenst about the workers only being donkeys for the gov and unions is often very true. Both govs and union officials use the workers to their own interest. The union official gets his position by using the workers, by convincing them he is doing the best for them he is again voted into office. It is all about power, and the one with the power is in control.
As to the mines, the viability is bound in economic benifits, many that at one time were not economical maybe now due to the change in methods of production and world demand. There are a number of gold mines here in Oz closed for many years. Then the price of gold went up, they re-opened and now make a profit. Such one day will be the fate of Uk mines once closed as uneconomical.

I am not someone with any mining experience, in fact never been down one, but as i understand it, once the mines were closed, the pumps were switched off and so were flooded, never to able to be used again. I stand to be corrected on this. KT

kieth there was a mine in wigan that closed but they were shipping sludge from other mines it was the waste they used when washing the coal and pumping it down the empty pit and with the heat down there it would solidify and if needed in years to come the shaft could reopen the mine was gibfield colliery .jp

It is about costs , anything can be done if the price you get can cover the costs and make a profit , you are looking at £300 - £400 a tonne in the UK at the moment depending on grade . Gibfield closed in 1963 , so any machinery and tunnels left with the props in place are all gone , you would therefore have to re cut the tunnels from a new shaft. In 1829, a shaft some 300 feet deep was sunk to the Trencherbone (locally the Five Foot) Mine alongside the newly constructed Leigh to Bolton railway, just north of the road to Wigan. Over 40 years passed before sinking commenced in 1872 on the Gibfield Arley Pit, which reached the Arley Mine at 1169ft depth. The Old Gib pit was also deepened and the two shafts served the colliery till a modern upcast shaft was constructed in 1909. By the 1940s the deepest seams, the Arley and Yard Mines, were exhausted, so extraction shifted to the shallower, but previously untouched, Plodder Mine. This kept the colliery working till 1963, when 725 underground and 116 surface workers were laid of . So I doubt there is any coal left there worth extracting

Just as a matter of interest Rob Cuadrilla have stopped operations on the Fracking until 2014.
Regards.
Jim.B.

To be truthful I think Fracking is a crazy idea for the UK in its current stage of development , it is known to cause mini earthquakes , and I am no Geologist , but deliberately causing Earthquakes makes no sense at all to me . I understood they had been told in December that they could resume in the Fylde area , but was not sure when . It has saved the USA's neck in global energy supplied , but you have a lot more wide open spaces here to play with , There are licences issued already that covers large chunks of East Yorkshire . I just would prefer there to be more knowledge on it rather than the Frack it ideals being used now

The anti fracking brigade say it gets into the water system they showed films from the USA showing people setting the water from their taps on fire.
Regards.
Jim.B.

I honestly don't know , but I would take a Not In My Back Yard approach if it was to come to a rock formation near me . When it comes to pro or anti anything , I have an inbuilt distrust of both sides , one is profit , the others are fighting a cause . The League Against Cruel Sports put out a video before Christmas that was so fake it should have come in a mock Gucci folder . The antis have used , some flawed arguments in their campaign

Fracking contaminates drinking water. One claim is that fracking creates cracks in rock formations that allow chemicals to leach into sources of fresh water. The problem with this argument is that the average shale formation is thousands of feet underground, while the average drinking well or aquifer is a few hundred feet deep. Separating the two is solid rock. There are no proven cases of this happening .


A second charge, based on a Duke University study, claims that fracking has polluted drinking water with methane gas. Methane is naturally occurring and isn’t by itself harmful in drinking water, though it can explode at high concentrations. Duke authors Rob Jackson and Avner Vengosh have written that their research shows “the average methane concentration to be 17 times higher in water wells located within a kilometer of active drilling sites.”.They failed to note that researchers sampled a mere 68 wells across Pennsylvania and New York—where more than 20,000 water wells are drilled annually. They had no baseline data and thus no way of knowing if methane concentrations were high prior to drilling. They also acknowledged that methane was detected in 85% of the wells they tested, regardless of drilling operations, and that they’d found no trace of fracking fluids in any wells.


Fracking releases toxic or radioactive chemicals. The reality is that 99.5% of the fluid injected into fracture rock is water and sand. The chemicals range from the benign, such as citric acid (found in soda pop), to benzene. States like Wyoming and Pennsylvania require companies to publicly disclose their chemicals, Texas recently passed a similar law, and other states will follow.Drillers must dispose of fracking fluids, and environmentalists charge that disposal sites also endanger drinking water, or that drillers deliberately discharge radioactive wastewater into streams. The latter accusation inspired the EPA to require that Pennsylvania test for radioactivity. States already have strict rules designed to keep waste water from groundwater, including liners in waste pits, and drillers are subject to stiff penalties for violations. Pennsylvania’s tests showed radioactivity at or below normal levels.


Fracking causes cancer. In Dish, Texas, Mayor Calvin Tillman caused a furor this year by announcing that he was quitting to move his sons away from “toxic” gases—such as cancer-causing benzene—from the town’s 60 gas wells. State health officials investigated and determined that toxin levels in the majority of Dish residents were “similar to those measured in the general U.S. population.” Residents with higher levels of benzene in their blood were smokers. (Cigarette smoke contains benzene.)


Fracking causes earthquakes. It is possible that the deep underground injection of fracking fluids might cause seismic activity. But the same can be said of geothermal energy exploration, or projects to sequester carbon dioxide underground.

The trouble when the "Anti " brigade start lying , I have doubts about their cause , and this bothers me . In many things the wishes of the minority get imposed on the majority , and the interests of the majority ignored by a campaign . I have seen campaigns by several organisations based on liies and with this one at this time , I really don't know ., i would like to see it go ahead under very strictly controlled conditions , and the results studied independently

When the Mines were left during the Strike, what happens is apart from flooding, the Roofs of the tunnels and the Floors crush until they meet each other. It just becomes solid rock, any machinery that was down there was also crushed flat due to the enormous pressure. There is no way you could just open a pit again when that has happened.

I did a spell down t`pit when I was 15, after being sacked by De Havilland as an apprentice, in 1950, it was not a life I cared for, I lasted for six months and then got a job in`t` cotton mill before going to the Vindicatrix.
Our seam was 3 to 4 feet high, so there is no way of standing up, , As Rob said, it was on the Plodder seam and then on the Arley seam from Brackley Colliery Fanworth Bolton. All the pits were eventually connecting up by tunnels under ground. Brackley Colliery closed down a few years before the Strike.
The cutter went along the coal face cutting in from the bottom about four feet, that fell down and then had to spaded onto the conveyor, hard graft on your hands and knees. As the face progressed more Props had to be fitted to stop the roof from coming down, and the conveyor moved constantly to keep pace with the cutting. I figured out that I would not have survived to pension age in a job like that. Many of the `Old men,` around 40 years old were knackered physically. coughing up black from their lungs, suffering from artheritis* and all kinds of ailments.
The Cotton Mills were the same, men coughing up cotton dust, Bysinosis, a type of lung cancer. Gasping for breath. and not old.
My Dad got dust on the lung, Bysinosis, when they shut the Mills and sent all the machinery out to India the Mighty Courtalds Group paid him a pension of £1. 30p a month for his Bysinosis, , paid on the first of the month for the month.
He died on 12 April, they came round to Mothers House and demanded the £1.30p back off an old widow, as it was paid in advance for the month, and as he didnt live for the month she had to give them £1.30p.
Unfortunately I was away for five months at the time or I would have caused some trouble.
So it was a seafaring life for me.
Cheers
Brian.