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The lucky citizens of Sheffield will shortly find in their midst, the world's second-only (at present the only one's in Japan, brought to you by the makers of Samurai swords no less) nuclear-reactor-shell-making foundry!

Graham Honeyman, chief executive at Sheffield Forgemasters, said: "The Government loan forms the final piece of a two-year project to finance the installation of a 15,000 tonne forging press which will place the UK at the peak of a global supply chain for civil nuclear manufacturing.

"This is a massive coup for UK manufacturing and firmly underpins the country's place at the leading edge of engineering technology."

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Good luck to them: For Export Only

How big are these things? Sheffield is quite far from the sea!

If they fit on trucks they can't be that big so why is such a unique facility needed? If they are really big, so they can't fit on trucks, how to they leave Sheffield?

clv101 wrote:How big are these things? Sheffield is quite far from the sea!

If they fit on trucks they can't be that big so why is such a unique facility needed? If they are really big, so they can't fit on trucks, how to they leave Sheffield?

Errr...good question!!
Cargolifter?

Isn't it more a case of there's only one foundry because there has been so little demand for the product and the government has just realised that its nuclear dreams will come to nought without more manufacturing capacity?

Probably.

With a bit of luck it'll take ages to build (won't get PP because it "Doesn't look nice(TM)") by which time the Nuke Dream will all be over due to, well you get the idea!

Kyboshed!

A lot of the cuts are typical Conservative antics. The actual amount of money saved by these cuts is minimal; getting out of Afghanistan would save oodles more.

Yer not wrong. Not only that but (it says in the Yorkshire Post today) half of God's Own County is raising hell about it. Erm, not me, mind.

I don't think they could possibly have made the right decision on this: leave it with its loan, and they're subsidising nukes (which both tories and lds swore they wouldn't do), knock it on the head and they've got a googlie from Mr Boycott. The best way out would be along the lines Biff mentioned: get the Men of Steel some cash to set up making crucial bits for wind turbines, and fast.

Everyone says that nukes can make money but no one wants to put up any money to do it. This rather suggests that there isn't any money in it and we would be chucking good money into a black hole again. Some of us can remember when we did that before and got the T-shirt. It was a very threadbare T-shirt.

There are supposed to be over 400 nukes being planned across the world so there should be quite a demand. Perhaps people have looked at Sheffield and thought what many of us did, "How the hell do you get them out?" After they built the first one we would then get the request for the upgraded transport facilities. More subsidies required.

Perhaps a plant in Newcastle or Sunderland would be a better bet for raising money. There are plenty of old shipyards there and probably some steel handling expertise still left.

Maybe if Sheffield produced the steel and sent it to the coast for forming it might be a more practical solution. Problem is then that you would have to reheat the steel to form it. Very costly. Maybe South Wales would be a better bet with an ex steel works on the coast.

Labour probably wouldn't get so many votes in South Wales though: a major consideration for them and also for the Tories. The Tories haven't a hope in hell of ever getting any votes in Sheffield so why bother subsidising that area. Perhaps they should start voting Tory!

The intersect between "areas where people have steel-making experience" and "areas where people generally vote tory" appears to be an Empty Set, which kind-of defines the problem.

Now biofuels...

Cleggybabes has personally penned a prolix apollogia(sp) in the weekend's Yorkshire Post. A whole page fer crying out loud. But he's right: it's only £80M and if it's such a screamingly good idea someone else'll stump up the readies.

RenewableCandy wrote:Cleggybabes has personally penned a prolix apollogia(sp) in the weekend's Yorkshire Post. A whole page fer crying out loud. But he's right: it's only £80M and if it's such a screamingly good idea someone else'll stump up the readies.

Indeed, and presumably elsewhere in the world. 80M is spare change for China; given that they will build nukes, why don't they want to build one or more factories for doing this stuff?


Peter.