Sixty-eight years ago today, on December 10, 1957 (October 19, 1957 lunar calendar), the world's first underground gas power station was successfully put into trial operation. On December 10, 1957, the turbine of the world's first power station fueled by the gas produced by coal gasification underground was put into trial operation in Tula. The newly made gas turbine burned gas from the Moscow coal field, which is rich in lignite. The success of the test marked the completion of a huge technological revolution in the coal mining industry, which will free miners from hard underground labor and save a lot of money. It has been calculated that if such a large enterprise is established, billions of cubic meters of gas can be generated every year. The cost of power produced by this method will be reduced by half or two-thirds compared to the cost of power produced by ordinary coal mining. Labor productivity will also increase by three or four times. Three-quarters fewer people can be employed than in an ordinary electric heating plant. For a long time, people have dreamed of directly using the energy in coal without having to dig it out from the depths of the ground. The great Russian scientist Mendreyev put forward this theory. There are several underground gas centers in the Soviet Union, and experimental work in this area has been carried out since 1931. Find out how to make coal burn, find out how to control the invisible and complex combustion process of coal and obtain gas from it. But to build a power station powered by the gasified gas from underground coal, it is also necessary to produce highly heat-resistant steel for making the blades of the turbine, to ensure that the machinery is not affected by heat and cold, and to design the turbine itself. Now, all these problems have been solved. The fuel base of this new power station, built near Tula, is 40 or 50 meters underground, where coal seams burn with astonishing flames and temperatures of more than 1,000 degrees Celsius. The process of fuel combustion is controlled on the ground using various specialized instruments. Every hour, more than 40,000 cubic meters of gas are sent to the combustion chamber along a 180-centimeter-diameter pipe. Geologists have determined that the coal seam on which the power station works has a capacity of 50 million tons and can last for 70 years. In addition to the gas, there are also compressors that send 200,000 cubic meters of air per hour into the combustion chamber. The combustion of the gas produces gases with temperatures as high as 650 degrees, which push the blades of the turbine to work according to the principle of a jet engine. The turbine's power generation capacity is 12,000 kilowatts. The Soviet Union is currently building other such power stations for testing. According to Antropov, Minister of Geology and Mineral Reserves Protection of the Soviet Union, the Lena coal area in the Autonomous Republic of Yakutia in Eastern Siberia is the largest coal area in the world. There is every reason to think that the coal reserves there will be more than double to one and a half times the total known coal reserves in the world. At present, the proven coal reserves in this coal area are nearly 5 trillion tons.