AGR v PWR The debate continues

Abstract

When the Central Electricity Generating Board (CEGB) invited tenders and placed a contract for the Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor (AGR) at Dungeness B in 1965 - preferring it to the Pressurised Water Reactor (PWR) — the AGR was lamentably ill developed. The effects of the decision were widely felt, for it took the British nuclear industry off the light water reactor highway of world reactor business and up an idiosyncratic private highway of its own, excluding it altogether from any material export business in the two decades which followed. Yet although the UK may have made wrong decisions in rejecting the PWR in 1965, that does not mean that it can necessarily now either correct them, or redeem their consequence, by reversing the choice in 1985. In the 20 years since 1965 the whole world economic and energy picture has been transformed and the national picture with it. Picking up the PWR now could prove as big a disaster as rejecting it may have been in 1965.