OPAL News

Since July 1st, the OPAL Reactor has run well, with an overall availability of 87% and a reliability of 84% (as measured against the original published schedule). However, we continue to experience major difficulties with the out-of-pile systems for the cold neutron source, and have only run with cold neutrons for 6 days in the last 3 months. At the time of writing there is no estimate for a return to cold-neutron service. We also continue to labour under an inflexible fuel management strategy, which has led to far more schedule changes than anyone desires.

Despite these difficulties, our four diffractometers (ECHIDNA, WOMBAT, KOWARI and KOALA) have used 90% of the available beam days, with KOALA the only instrument using less than 95%. User experiments have comprised 62% of the available reactor days on these 4 diffractometers, with the proportion as high as 78% on WOMBAT.