The Whiteish Heat of Technology - No AGRs

It's the mid 1960s and Britain is trying to pick the technology to use for her next generation of nuclear power stations. Under government pressure the CEGB picked the Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor and then spent the next 18 years trying to make the damned thing work.

What if the government had listened to the doubts of the CEGB chief Christopher Hinton and gone for a less ambitious reactor design but the same ambitious building programme? What is the effect on 1970s politics of having viable nuclear power plants in place and operational instead of the historic cost over-runs and delays?
 
Easier defeat of the miners. With the power system less dependent on coal the NUM will lose its stranglehold sooner.
 
The AGR design is approximately 20% more efficient than the PWRs used in France and in the United States. The technology is however more complicated and was consequently a lot more difficult to master and introduce. I am nevertheless tempted to say that if the plans aiming at building one new reactor each year had been successfully implemented, costs would have gone down as economies of scale increased.

While it was not as obvious then as it is now, the gas cooled reactor path as a much higher long term technological potential than the water reactor path. The PWR technology can't be drastically improved beyond using supercritical water as working fluid instead of water/steam and even this only mean that reactior efficiencies only reach 45%, better that the 34% of a conventional PWR that's for sure but not as good as the 55% made possible by a Very High Temperature Reactor.

Several "exotic" combinations were investigated in the United Kingdom during the seventies including the Steam Generating Heavy Water Reactor similar to the Canadian CANDU reactors. I would say that in order to minimise costs it would be wise to neglect these exotic types and to concentrate only on improving the AGR design yet further towards something resembling a Very High Temperature Reactor.
 
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