But it does run flat out apart from refuelling and maintenance. Do you not agree?
Some of the remaining AGR units are licenced to refuel under load, albeit some only at reduced power.
The travails of the AGR loading system are long and boring.
For a long time the records for longest continuous run have been held either by British or Canadian reactors, although the Indians have now managed to pinch it.
Heysham II Unit 8 did manage to remain on load for 940 days, which is approaching the statutory maximum of 1095 days before it was shut down for maintenance and inspection.
Remember with nuclear your fuel costs virtually nothing and equipment tends to break when you switch it on or off, so the reactors are kept running whenever possible.
I like the sound of the small reactors Rolls Royce want to make based on the submarine ones.
Small enough to be prefab and trucked in. Less capital lumpy and theoretically quicker to set up.
The problem is Rolls Royce have no real experience on building civil reactors.
And submarine reactors are hilariously expensive to build and operate, what with them being filled with bomb grade material.
It is not clear they really have any relevant experience at all.
The Hinckley EPR has itself been described as "the first of its kind" by its own people, albeit based on what they've so far failed to get operating in France and Finland.
The EPR is an example of what happens when you design a reactor by committee, trying to combine two designs with fundamentally different safety philosophies and neither side is willing to concede that their system is inferior. It's a terrible mash up of a Konvoi-type Siemens PWR and a late model French unit.
That is why it has insane features like a core-catcher that are unlikely to significantly imporve the safety of the plant but cost enormous amounts to make.
It is only being built at all because of French exceptionalism at EdF and in the French Government.
AP1000 has problems with its pump shafts disintegrating in testing, and the plant is designed such that they cannot be replaced once the plant is built.
The APR1400 is better, but it's been embroiled in scandals in Korea with faked cable approvals and the like, as well as the mess in the UAE caused by problems in actually training enough staff to start up the finished reactors.
As someone proposing an emergency nuclear build programme in their PhD, it is a bit disheartening.
(My provisional target is one gigawatt scale unit per month)