For the period July-September 2009, 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: although the cold neutron source was successfully restarted on 6th October, the turbine in the cold box seized on 13 October.
A spare turbine has been fitted, and before restarting, we await guidance from the manufacturer in Europe, once they have investigated the root cause of the problem.
At the time of writing we do not have an estimate for a return to cold-neutron service. We will keep our users informed as new information comes in.
We also continue to operate under an inflexible fuel management strategy, which has led to far more schedule changes than we desire.
Despite these difficulties, our four diffractometers (ECHIDNA, WOMBAT, KOWARI and KOALA) used 90% of the available beam days in the last quarter, 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.
Published: 13/10/2009