Open-pool Australian lightwater reactor

The Argentine company INVAP was fully responsible through a turnkey contract, signed in June 2000, for the delivery of the reactor, performing the design, construction and commissioning.

Protestors gained access to the grounds, the HIFAR reactor, the high-level radioactive waste store and the radio tower.

Their protest highlighted the security and environmental risks of the production of nuclear materials and the shipment of radioactive waste from the facility.

[5] OPAL was opened on 20 April 2007 by then Australian Prime Minister John Howard[6] and is the replacement for the HIFAR reactor.

ANSTO received an operating licence from the Australian Radiation Protection and Nuclear Safety Agency (ARPANSA) in July 2006, allowing commencement of hot commissioning, where fuel is first loaded into the reactor core.

[7] The reactor core consists of 16 low-enriched plate-type fuel assemblies and is located under 13 metres (43 ft) of water in an open pool.

ECHIDNA allows for structure determinations, texture measurements and reciprocal space mapping of single crystals in most different sample environments serving the physics, chemistry, materials, minerals and earth-science communities.

Although up to three different angles of incidence are required for each reflectivity curve, the time-of-flight nature means that timescales of kinetic processes are accessible.

It has been designed for highest flux and data acquisition speed in order to deliver time resolved diffraction patterns in a fraction of a second.

Wombat will concentrate on in-situ studies and time critical investigations, such as structure determinations, texture measurements and reciprocal space mapping of single crystals in most different sample environments serving the physics, chemistry, materials, minerals and earth-science communities.

Strain scanning using thermal neutrons is a powder diffraction technique in a polycrystalline block of material probing the change of atomic spacing due to internal or external stress.

One of the main features is the sample table that will allow examination of large engineering components while orienting and positioning them very accurately.

Each 30 days operating cycle more than 150 batches of Silicon are irradiated, Mo99 is produced on a regular basis for the nuclear medicine market.