Late last night, the OPAL Reactor and its cold neutron source successfully returned to service after the 3-week shutdown to make major changes to the cold-source control system. This occurred according to schedule.
Most of the instruments resumed service immediately, but as we announced on 20 March, TAIPAN will remain out of service for another two months until 12 September 2014: its extended shutdown is allowing us to install the ARC-funded beryllium-filter (secondary-spectrometer) option and integrate it into TAIPAN.
In addition, during the last quarter (April - June 2014, inclusive), Reactor Operations ran both OPAL and its cold source with 100% adherence to the published schedule for the whole three months. This was a first, and we are very grateful to the Reactor Operations team, led by Lubi Dimitrovski and David Vittorio, for making this happen.
Published: 28/06/2014