British development plants

The American faciUties also differed fundamentally from the British faciUties in regard to maintenance philosophy. The American plants were designed to employ remote maintenance, ie, to remove and replace equipment using shielded cranes operating inside the shielded stmcture. The British developed a contact approach based on simplified designs for equipment downstream of the fission product removal step. The British approach has been used at all commercial faciUties. 

Table 6.27 British Gas/Lurgi (BGL) gasification development plants [206-208,210 11].

It isn t like a Canada Deuterium Uranium (CANDU) plant for example, which is quite different, or the gas-cooled reactors that the British developed. The French use a light-water reactor. However, their overall plant philosophy was ultimately based on getting the breeders going to close the fuel cycle. As you may recall, they had the demo Phoenix plant, and they were planning to build the one that was going to be the first of the actual units to do this, sort of make the whole thing work together. 

Large-scale SCP production processes for growing yeasts of the genus Candida from hydrocarbon substrates were developed by British Petroleum Co., Ltd. and Kanegafuchi Chemical Industry, Ltd. of Japan (57). However, the 100,000-t/yr capacity plants based on these processes, and constmcted in Sardinia and Italy, were abandoned because of regulatory agency questions regarding residual hydrocarbon contents of the products (2,3). 

Bosch also helped develop Haber s process into an industrial process. In 1913, Haber and Bosch opened an ammonia manufacturing plant in Germany. A year later, World War I started. Saltpeter had another use besides making fertilizer. It was also necessary to make nitric acid that was used to make explosives. When the war started, the British Navy quickly cut off Germany s supply of Chilean saltpeter. If not for the Haber process, some historians estimate that Germany would have run out of nitrates to make explosives by 1916. The war lasted another two years, however, because Germany did not need to rely on outside sources of nitrates for fertilizers or explosives. 

CRG [Catalytic Rich Gas] A process for making town gas and rich gas from light petroleum distillate (naphtha). The naphtha is reacted with steam over a nickel-alumina catalyst yielding a gas mixture rich in methane. Developed by British Gas and used in the United Kingdom in the 1960s, but abandoned there after the discovery of North Sea gas. In 1977,13 plants were operating in the United States. 

KAAP [Kellogg advanced ammonia process] The first high-pressure process developed for synthesizing ammonia from its elements which does not use an iron-containing catalyst. The reformer gas for this process is provided by the KRES process. The catalyst was developed by BP it contains ruthenium supported on carbon. Developed by MW Kellogg Company in 1990 and first installed by the Ocelot Ammonia Company (now Pacific Ammonia) at Kitimat, British Columbia, from 1991 to 1992. Another plant was installed at Ampro Fertilizers in Donaldsonville, LA, in 1996. 

Stretford A process for removing hydrogen sulfide and organic sulfur compounds from coal gas and general refinery streams by air oxidation to elementary sulfur, using a cyclic process involving an aqueous solution of a vanadium catalyst and anthraquinone disulfonic acid. Developed in the late 1950s by the North West Gas Board (later British Gas) and the Clayton Aniline Company, in Stretford, near Manchester. It is the principle process used today, with over 150 plants licensed in Western countries and at least 100 in China. 

BP has investments in an ethanol plant with DuPont and Associated British Foods. It is also investing in cellulosic ethanol research and developing jatropha as a biodiesel feedstock. BP and DuPont are planning a biobutanol demonstration plant and BP would like to eventually convert their ethanol plant to biobutanol production. BP has a 400 million investment with Associated British Foods and DuPont to build a bioethanol plant in the U.K. that may be converted to biobutanol. It has spent 500 million over 10 years at the Energy Biosciences Institute in California to research future biofuels and 9.4 million over 10 years to fund the Energy and Resources Institute (TERI) in India to study the production of biodiesel from Jatropha curcas. It also has a 160 million joint venture with D1 Oils to develop the planting of Jatropha curcas. 

Karl Bosch (1874-1940) and Alwin Mittasch (1869-1953) of Badische Anilin- und Soda-Fabrik eliminated the nitrate shortage that occurred after the British sea blockade effectively cut off the nitrate supply from Chile. By May of 1915, they had successfully developed at their Oppau Plant an industrial-scale process for oxidizing ammonia. Their process converted the large quantities of synthetic ammonia produced by the Haber process to nitric acid and other nitrates that were essential for fertilizers and explosives. (10)... 

The prices of medicines sold to the NHS are controlled in the United Kingdom by the PPRS, negotiated periodically every 5 to 6 years by the DoH with the Association of the British Pharmaceutical Industry (ABPI), for example in 1979, 1986, 1993 and 1999. The PPRS controls the maximum - but not guaranteed - profits that pharmaceutical companies make on the capital they have invested in plant for research, development and manufacturing for sales made to the NHS. (Capital employed by the individual companies... 

I. B. Balfour also thought it strange that Dr. Rutherford should have been chosen to teach botany, and stated in the Makers of British Botany that Rutherford was a chemist, and I have not discovered in any references to him expressions that he was at this period of his life interested in plants otheiwise than as objects for his experiments in relation to the chemistry of the atmosphere (32). Nevertheless, tile botanical garden developed under Rutherford s administration into one of the best in the world, and the plants of Scotland were carefully recorded by the head gardeners (32). 

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