ANSTO Facilities
ANSTO ensures Australia continues to play a key international role in nuclear-based scientific research. The organisation's sophisticated facilities offer a wealth of opportunities for researchers to work towards solutions which benefit all Australians, both in the community and industry.
Major Research Facilities include:
The new OPAL reactor became operational in January 2007. It is the single largest investment in Australian science. It will have twice the power (20MW) of the existing HIFAR reactor. OPAL offers enhanced safety, between four and ten times the irradiation capability, far superior neutron scattering abilities, and includes some of the most sophisticated measuring instruments in the world. It will boost ANSTO's capacity to produce beneficial radioisotope products and irradiation services, and help Australian industry to compete more successfully.
The medical cyclotron at the Royal Prince Alfred Hospital in Sydney creates short-lived radioisotopes, which are essential parts of radiopharmaceuticals used as diagnostic tools in medicine. They can indicate blood flow, detect malfunctions in metabolism, and are being used to diagnose heart conditions, neurodegenerative and thyroid diseases as well as cancer. Increasingly they are also being used to research Alzheimer's and Hodgkin's diseases.
ANSTO's particle accelerators - the Australian National Tandem Accelerator for Applied Research (ANTARES) and Small Tandem for Applied Research (STAR) - significantly assist the study of the environment, nuclear safeguards, geology, archaeology and palaeontology.
They can be used to measure, monitor and characterise air particles to give us accurate pollution reports.
Their carbon dating techniques give accurate models of past climate systems by dating the retreat of glaciers. Radio-carbon dating is used to examine ocean currents and up-wellings of water from the ocean depths. All these results are of significant use in climate change research, as well as archaeology and palaeontology.
ANTARES also has a nuclear non-proliferation application: assisting security agencies in measuring the presence of uranium, plutonium and iodine129, and detecting illicit processing and activities in suspected locations.
The accelerators' high energy, ion beam techniques also permit highly detailed analysis of the surface of materials, which are often impossible to characterise satisfactorily by other, low energy methods. This helps industry understand the structure of biological, geological and man-made materials, and how to use them more efficiently. This also allows a wide range of nuclear reactions and techniques to be used for element-specific studies.
Secondary Ion Mass Spectrometer (SIMS)
SIMS is a specialised analytical technique used to analyse a diverse range of environmental and biological samples such as minerals, aquatic materials and bone, and detect trace elements in the surface and near surface regions from 2nm down to 10 microns.
It can detect a range of elements from hydrogen to uranium in parts per million and parts per billion quantities.
Its diverse range of applications includes environmental monitoring, failure analysis of semiconductor devices, isotopic analysis of geological features, and analysis of new materials and surface coatings.