Coal Nuclear and gas fired power stations

All these power stations use basically the same method to generate electricity.
In a way it is quite old fashioned as the fuel is used to boil water to make steam.  That steam is then used to drive turbines which in turn run the generators.

Even biomass stations do this.  The problem comes when the fuel you choose has an unwanted side effect like the emission of CO2, carbon dioxide, which is considered to be the major cause of global warming.

The only difference is the method of creating the heat. In a coal fired station coal is ground to a dust-like consistency and fed into a furnace.  The waste ash is quite acidic and disposing of it can be problematic.  Some of it is mixed with cement and cast into breeze blocks for the building industry, where is can be used in construction of houses.  Because of the trapped air in a breeze block it is a fairly good insulating material, however a great deal of waste power station ash is pumped into landfill.

Gas fired power stations simply burn natural gas that has to be delivered long distances by pipelines.  Increasingly, much of the gas we burn is imported.

Nuclear power stations work by harnessing the power of splitting atoms.  They are very efficient and produce no CO2 but the waste they produce is highly dangerous and remains so for thousands of years.  Decommissioning redundant nuclear reactors is a huge and very expensive problem, as is the safe storage of spent nuclear fuels.