Open-pool Australian Lightwater Reactor - History

History

The Argentine company INVAP was fully responsible through a turn key contract for the delivery of the reactor, performing the design, construction and commissioning. The facility is currently in operation.

OPAL was opened on 20 April 2007 by then Australian Prime Minister John Howard and is the replacement for the HIFAR reactor. ANSTO received an operating license 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. OPAL went critical for the first time on 12 August 2006 and reached full power on 3 November 2006.

Read more about this topic:  Open-pool Australian Lightwater Reactor

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    Every generation rewrites the past. In easy times history is more or less of an ornamental art, but in times of danger we are driven to the written record by a pressing need to find answers to the riddles of today.... In times of change and danger when there is a quicksand of fear under men’s reasoning, a sense of continuity with generations gone before can stretch like a lifeline across the scary present and get us past that idiot delusion of the exceptional Now that blocks good thinking.
    John Dos Passos (1896–1970)

    If man is reduced to being nothing but a character in history, he has no other choice but to subside into the sound and fury of a completely irrational history or to endow history with the form of human reason.
    Albert Camus (1913–1960)

    The history of the Victorian Age will never be written: we know too much about it.
    Lytton Strachey (1880–1932)