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01 ANSTO HIFARLucas Heights2022
ISO 640.6sf/6.314mm
Series · 49 prints
Map · Mapbox · OpenStreetMap
At 11:15 pm on Sunday 26 January 1958, Australia Day, the High Flux Australian Reactor went critical for the first time with 11 of 25 fuel elements loaded. The men in the control room had come from Oak Ridge, Chalk River and Harwell. HIFAR was Australia's first nuclear reactor.
HIFAR was one of six DIDO-class reactors built worldwide, a heavy-water-moderated 10 MW design. The reactor block was a right irregular decagonal prism of iron-shot concrete, steel-clad, 6.7 metres across the flats, sitting behind the white containment dome that became the visible landmark of the Lucas Heights skyline. Head Wrightson of Stockton-on-Tees built it under contract from 1955, with Stephenson and Turner of Sydney as consulting architects.
HIFAR was built to support a civil nuclear power programme that Australia never adopted. What kept it running for half a century instead was nuclear medicine and semiconductor production. The reactor produced technetium-99m generators shipped to 11 Asia-Pacific countries, and from around 1985 it irradiated high-purity silicon for the global semiconductor industry.
HIFAR shut down at 10:25 am on 30 January 2007, 49 years and 4 days after first criticality, the last of the six DIDO-class reactors worldwide to go cold. OPAL, a 20 MW open-pool reactor built by INVAP in Argentina, had reached full power on the same site three months earlier. Engineering Heritage Australia listed HIFAR as a National Engineering Landmark in 2001, and the containment shell is retained while Phase A decommissioning proceeds.
Engineers Australia (HIFAR NEL nomination), W.H. Roberts (The Design and Construction of HIFAR, 1958) and ANSTO (End of an era for Australia's first nuclear reactor)
Hand-signed limited editions, printed from the original RAW file. Editions run from 100 down to 25 and are not reissued once they sell through.
Made to order by Brett in Sydney, from the original RAW file. Each print is hand-signed and numbered before it ships.
Paper
Ilford Galerie cotton rag, 310 gsm. Acrylic on metallic gloss, 260 gsm.
Lead time
Unframed: 5 to 10 business days. Framed and acrylic: 10 to 20.
People talk about what it was like to work or stay in these places, who they knew, what they did, how great the Christmas parties were, that store man nobody liked, what all the different machines were, how they worked and what became of them.
Broadsheet
On the LC archive.
There's this sense of wonder you get when looking at abandoned buildings. You try to imagine what these spaces were like when they were filled with busy workers trying to meet production targets. And why did they close?
The Guardian
On the LC archive.
I'm often contacted by people who used to frequent the places I photographed. They share stories that enter the collections as additions or corrections. Sometimes they send their own photos from the same viewpoints, taken decades earlier.
The Guardian
On the LC archive.