OK, so it could have continued to be used for a maximum of 10 years but they would probably have been planning to get rid of it in the near future - it could go offline without any disruption to power supplies, but saving it was still a priority because a replacement wouldn't have been in place.
Yeah, I forgot to report it with all that happened since. Yes, trying to save the reactor would have been on their priority list, the more so since the power would be badly needed after the tsunami. I am just speculating here, but that may have led them to try other methods first, some that wouldn't have resulted in a dead and un-recertifiable reactor. There has been some talk on US forums by former operators of similar (and now decommissioned BWRs) here in the States about how the AEC (now NRC) would have told them to just kill the reactors significantly sooner than the Japanese did, in the name of public safety. Especially after Three Mile Island; this is something a lot of people will be looking at in the days to come.
I will be very interested in reading the 'post-mortems' of the incident when it comes out.
Spectre-man, I asked a good few pages back in this thread (it probably got lost XD ) about your thoughts on AGR's? You have anything to say about them?
Keep in mind that my opinion is that of a layman in the nuclear world.
- I don't trust anything that uses graphite rods as a moderator. Graphite will actually accelerate the reaction briefly before moderating it (which is what happened at Chernobyl - the already hot and redlined plant had the graphite rods go in, went beyond redline, and we all know what happened next.)
- The use of gases for cooling is also not comforting to me, as liquid leaks are easily spotted, even visually, and gas leaks aren't. The normal operating temperatures of the coolant gas leaving the reactor core (around 650C, as I recall) makes me nervous just from a materials science standpoint; high operating temperatures were part of why the US atomic energy program rejected cores cooled by liquid lead or sodium, for example.
- Finally, as far as I know, the AGRs still do not have a tertiary shutdown system (last I looked, they were 'contemplating' a system by which balls of boron would be dumped en masse into the core's cooling spaces, normally occupied by the cooling gases, but had not implemented it yet).
I believe there was also a recent expos? in the British press that pointed out that AGRs also had woefully inadequate core monitoring systems as well as fuel cracking problems that nobody knew how to prevent.
The whole thing is basically set up as a weird and pointlessly unique nuclear reactor designed to power a conventional coal plant's boiler system in order avoid having to design and build a new genset - or buy one in from outside the Empire.
Bottom line: I don't want to live anywhere near one. Apparently nobody else does either because there have been exactly zero sales of the design outside the UK, despite some pretty hard lobbying around the world.
Edit: By the way, I'm not being mindlessly rah-rah-US-nukes-rule either. There are good designs and bad from around the world. The AGR happens to be, IMHO, one of the bad ones.
- The French, whom I have no love for, licensed Westinghouse designs way back when and have built themselves an advanced, reliable and safe family of reactors since.
- The Germans, who have some of the worst designs actually installed, actually have originated some very interesting and revolutionary designs. They seem to have gotten around the issues with gas cooling, graphite moderators, and turned them to advantages; in fact, they appear to be
melt-down proof.
- The Japanese themselves have gone on to produce some very interesting and (at least on paper) extremely safe designs of their own, like
the Toshiba 4S 'nuclear battery' which also get around the objections to liquid metal coolants.