CONSTITUENCY STATEMENTS
Mr MONCRIEFF (Hughes) (09:39): Next week is National Science Week, but today is a very special day for the Australian scientific community. The Open Pool Australian Lightwater Reactor, or OPAL, is Australia's only operating nuclear reactor and one of our most significant scientific assets. It underpins critical capabilities and provides the infrastructure for medical, scientific and industrial applications, and it's right in the middle of southern Sydney, in ANSTO's Lucas Heights facilities.
Today marks 20 years since the OPAL reactor first reached criticality on 12 August 2006. Approved in the late nineties, the federal government funded the construction of a new research reactor to replace HIFAR, the High Flux Australian Reactor, with construction for the new reactor commencing in 2002. Construction was managed in partnership between ANSTO and Argentine nuclear technology company INVAP, as well as Australian alliance partners.
Its construction workforce peaked at 500 people, with a core team of over 100 specialists. Just four years later, OPAL reached criticality—the achievement of a self-sustaining fission chain reaction. In the 5,220 operating days since, this 20-megawatt reactor has irradiated over 10 million nuclear medicine doses supplied to Australian hospitals used to combat cancer and heart disease.
It has irradiated 900 tonnes of silicon across more than 36,000 batches. It has enabled over 8,000 neutron scattering experiments and the publication of over 2,500 articles in scientific journals. But the real power behind OPAL's success is the talented team of researchers at ANSTO, whose achievements extend to COVID research, cancer diagnostics and therapies, advanced energy systems, electronics, quantum materials, agriculture improvements, the preservation of cultural heritage and much more.
Unassumingly located in the quiet bush suburb of Lucas Heights in my electorate of Hughes, OPAL is the world's largest irradiator of NDT silicon, the unsung net zero hero that powers the semiconductors found in EVs, wind and solar. I have the distinct privilege of visiting ANSTO facilities often, one that I share with more than 20,000 school and university students who have visited ANSTO across its lifetime.
Every time I go, I learn something new about science and something new about the research and production that some of the most dynamic and gifted minds in Australia's scientific community are conducting right in southern Sydney. Thank you so much to the team at ANSTO for all that you add to our country's knowledge and capability and congratulations on this 20-year milestone for Australian excellence in nuclear science.