Limestone? It's used, I learned, to clean the sulphur out of the smoke, in a relatively recent bolt-on upgrade. This, along with the efficiency of its relatively youthful and scrupulously maintained equipment, makes Drax less of a pollution nightmare than you might assume. Even Friends of the Earth, which understandably hates what it calls "carbon dinosaur" power stations, has to admit that Drax is the most efficient of its kind. "It will probably be the last dinosaur left standing," FoE admits. The by-product of the limestone smoke cleaning process is immense amounts of gypsum, which is sold to make plaster. A lot of the waste ash is sold, too, to make concrete blocks of various kinds. So there are buildings all round us that are made from Drax's leftovers, the dry residue that comes from burning up to 36,000 tonnes of coal every day, 13 million tones a year. For me this just increases the mystic power of the place, further proof of its grip on the national economy. There is a modern high priesthood, a priesthood that wields real power because it controls the power and materials we need. If they wished, they could bring politicians and kings to their knees. And Drax is its temple.
"There's something about the physicality of Drax, something almost elemental about it," reflects Gordon Horsfield, who calls himself chairman rather than High Priest, and proffers a card with the logo of Drax Power Limited as we sip coffee in his office overlooking the plant. He pauses. "It's the ultimate big boy's toy. I never had a trainset. My brother had a trainset. But now I've got Drax."
By now I have been round the plant and I know exactly what he means. Earplugs in place, I have walked through the cacophonous turbine hall, 1,371 feet long, 180 feet wide and over 100 feet high. In it I have seen the six colossal turbines, painted blue, set for some reason at a jaunty angle. One is being dismantled for maintenance: its blades are like something out of a Boeing 747. I go next door, into the even huger boiler house. Each of the six boilers is the height of a 15-storey office block. Out the back I see things like giant pepper mills that grind the coal into dust to be squirted into the furnaces.
I go up the chimney in a clanking miner's lift, squeezed into the space between the three colossal flues that rise up through the single massive shaft of the chimney. Claustrophobics need not apply. Emerging at the top to stand among the immense bolted-steel chimney-pots is unnerving. Such energy is pumping past you, piling noiselessly into the sky above you. You are standing at the height of William Pereira's Transamerica pyramid in San Franciso, or Norman Foster's Commerzbank in Frankfurt. Yet out there on the platform in the open air, there is no perceptible heat, no sound or fury beyond a faint rumble. Below you are the circles of steaming cooling towers. In the distance, the horizon curves away. It is all very peaceful.
Later I am driven in a Land Rover around the adjacent "Barlow Mound", where the ash that is not sold is formed into a long, low, landscaped hill which is then covered with earth and returned to farmland and woodland. That's where I see the hares and the deer. Beneath it - evidence of earlier industry on the site - is the remains of a wartime munitions bunker. Stacks of empty shell cases are still to be seen in the woods around. When future archaeologists dig into this mysterious flat-topped landform, a 120-foot high plateau, they will be in for a surprise. They will conclude, wrongly, that Drax was, indeed, some kind of military installation.
The glory of the place is that it is, essentially, Victorian. Coal-fired boilers raising steam to drive turbines which power electricity generators? It's not exactly the Starship Enterprise. It is very, very simple and very, very big. Of course there is a large control room full of blinking lights and buttons and computer screens. In fact there are two control rooms, one to handle all the materials and one to manage the generation. And the bolt-on plant which takes the sulphur out of the smoke - this in itself is the size of most normal power stations - is a bit clever. The chimney at Drax used to belch poisonous-looking yellow stuff. Not any more.
It and its companion power stations were conceived to exploit a huge national resource: the then-new Selby coalfield, Britain's most modern. Said to be the size of the Isle of Wight, it opened in 1976 and was confidently predicted to last 40 years - longer than North Sea oil. Tony Benn, then Energy Secretary, spoke of "restoring King Coal to his throne in this country." And his outlook was bullish. "Britain can look forward to ample supplies of energy as far ahead as we can see," he said, so placing himself at the mercy of history. Because once the coal industry was privatized under Margaret Thatcher, and once the vast drifts of coal proved a bit more difficult to mine than had been expected, and given a worldwide slump in the price of coal - well, the Selby field with its four pits closed this year, 2004, after just 18 years. There are still a few big mines left and Drax, which buys its coal from wherever is cheapest, even Australia, still burns a surprising amount of the English black gold. But it turned out not to need the Selby field on top of which it sits.
