"The old Magnox..reactors have.. successful life. The next generation - Sizewell B etc"
The Magnox reactors were viewed as machines for making Plutonium for the UK nuclear bomb supply. Electricity was viewed as a side benefit.
Sizewell B was a PWR with a core systems design (including cooling loop designs) by Westinghouse.
The actual British 2nd generation was the Advanced Gas Cooled Reactor. IIRC this can match the steam characteristics of big coal and oil fired plants (which are about 200c hotter than PWRs) so you can avoid special PWR only turbines and alternators, the other big parts of a power station.
The downside is they need enriched uranium (Magnox was designed to use natural) and run CO2 at around 1000-1500psi (a PWR runs at 200atm but the water is much denser so the core is smaller), needing a shed load of pre-stresed concrete for the pressure vessel to contain it.
But the real downside is the continual tweaking by boffins, multiplied by numerous strikes meant some of them were 15 years late coming online, by which time everyone else had either bought PWRs or the CANDU design (which the British seem to look down on but is pretty flexible in terms of fuel). Also no two sites are exactly alike (which set of plans should you use?) and IIRC finding a new supplier for the complex shaped graphite blocks is going to be a PITA.
Biting the hand that feeds IT
