Upgrade, rebuild or replace?

Ageing reactor simulators present some tough decisions for utility managers. Although most utilities have chosen the cheaper, upgrading solution as the best compromise between costs and outage length, some US utilities have found that for them, replacement represents the best option. Simulators may be less than ten years old, but they have limited instructor systems, older low fidelity models that cannot reproduce important training scenarios, and out of date, difficult to maintain computers that do not permit much expansion of the models anyway. Perhaps worse than this is the possibility that the simulator may no longer be a faithful reproduction of the referenced plant, or have poor (or non-existent) documentation. (author)