HIFAR Control Room

The HIFAR control room at ANSTO is a long, low-ceilinged room with a desk-and-panel arrangement that runs along one wall. The panels are mid-grey enamel, mounted with toggle switches, indicator lamps, and analogue gauges from the late 1950s through the 1980s. Some switches are labelled in Dymo tape, others by hand on small cardboard tags. The desk in front of the panels has built-in writing surfaces and small cathode-ray tube monitors. A single 1980s-era computer terminal sits at one end of the desk, retrofitted into the original setup. The walls behind are pale green, the colour of institutional rooms across the same era.

This is where Australia's first nuclear reactor was run from. Operators at this desk monitored the reactor flux, coolant flow, and shielding integrity throughout HIFAR's forty-nine years of operation, from 1958 to 2007. The reactor produced medical isotopes for hospitals across Australia and the wider region, ran neutron-beam experiments for materials science, and irradiated silicon for the semiconductor industry. The control room was the working centre of all of it. After the reactor was shut down in 2007, the control room was left as it was, a single step removed from operating, and the room in this photograph is what remains of that arrangement.