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
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—Henry David Thoreau (18171862)