It's not the way we wanted to do it, but it's the best option we have available to us right now. We're obviously very sorry for the trouble this is causing.

We don't have a workable solution right now that answers all the issues, that's pretty much the problem. Sometimes that's a thing that happens, unfortunately.

That script involves, in practice, removing all the fuel in towers and then adding new fuel to the towers (you're altering types and quantities, and the final quantities have to be larger because of the number of isotopes and so on in the mix, so it's got to be effectively to be a remove and an add). The worst that happens is that the remove happens but the add doesn't and everything goes offline, and testing this requires an upgrade test which (as we've established) is risky in and of itself and takes a lot of time to prepare.

An extra fuel bay, switching the tower to run on dual fuel types or anything else of that nature requires us to make major changes to the starbase code, which is both risky in and of itself as a major code change, and doubly risky because the starbase code is pretty failure-prone. Plus, making sure that towers ran smoothly when we threw the switch would require another upgrade test; see above.

@CCP Greyscale - here's another suggestion for a temporary code fix:

Can you change the current fuel consumption rate from N units per hour to N units per every 6-8 hours?

This would effectively stretch the existing fuel supplies in all of the towers, to last until the revised changeover date.