Some thoughts and an HTML table experiment

When travelling by train from London to Bristol one passes through Didcot, where a whacking great powerstation lies just to the north of Didcot Parkway station. It looks quite good, the owners RWE (FRG) are tidying up the landscape. Thanks.

But why is it there, in Oxfordshire? It doesn't sit on a coal mine. And it's quite big. Probably, one has to look no further than the site of a former air base at Aldermaston, a few miles to the north. My godfather was a 'metallurgist', he said, and worked at Harwell. He didn't tell me that he worked at the Atomic Weapons Research Establishment. They needed a lot of electricity, so I suppose Didcot was the solution. Harwell/Aldermaston is also the site of the Joint European Torus experiment in the generation of power through fusion. Legend has it that Didcot rattles, wheezes and nearly flakes out when they fire up the torus, and it manages to produce enough power for a 20 watt bulb. Mind you, it does that in a few picoseconds or whatever. And then nobody can go near it for months. But they'll get there in the end. Of course, like Didcot, the AWRE Aldermaston has been sold off.

Fuel	Total MW	Overall	UK %
Nuclear	12,097	15.1%	0.0%
Coal	29,007	36.2%	10.2%
Gas	28,523	35.6%	9.8%
Oil	4,323	5.4%	0.0%
Gasoil	1,311	1.6%	0.4%
Hydro	4,236	5.3%	1.7%
Wind	2,043	2.6%	0.7%
Biomass	179	0.2%	0.0%

To get back onto the theme: the UK doesn't own much of the generation power in the Kingdom. Actually, it is laughable: we own 0% of the power from nuclear, oil and biomass; around 10% each of coal and gas; 1.7% of hydro; 0.7% of wind; and 0.7% of light oil.

Windmills all over the place, against the wishes of the residents in many cases, and we own 0.7% of the output. Who has been shafted, and by whom?

Next up: RANT, RANT, RANT, RANT, RANT, RANT, RANT, RANT.