"Nothing like this will be built again"

Worth noting that the visitor centre for Torness recently re-opened, it looks like you need to make an appointment in advance (for security checks) but, having had a detailed tour of another AGR plant years ago, I suspect it may be worth visiting: http://www.edfenergy.com/about-us/energy-generation/nuclear-... Also, if you do visit Torness and you have an interest in science (which seems likely) then you might want to visit the nearby Hutton's Unconformity at Siccar Point - this is one of the places…

When I worked in academia I did one project with Scottish Nuclear and one of their team had worked on the project to build Torness. He had a story about one of the failure modes they had to consider during the design. AGRs can be refueled while they are operational by a huge machine that moves across the top of the reactor and allows the fuel rods to be extracted from the extremely high pressure environment of the reactor core…

Cool. I for one would very much like to see more hacker tourism stories, though they probably have a higher research cost than fiction. Maybe a Kickstarter project to at least get Stross and Stephenson some plane tickets…

A fascinating account of a special access tour of an operational Advanced Gas Cooled nuclear reactor (AGR). http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Advanced_gas-cooled_reactor http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Torness_nuclear_power_station