Research Selections 2011

The Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation (ANSTO) is the home of Australia’s nuclear science expertise. This expertise is applied to radiopharmaceutical production and biomedical research, climate change research, water resource management, materials engineering, neutron science and a range of other disciplines. ANSTO is a Federal Government agency with the mission to apply nuclear science for the benefit of all Australians. It operates Australia’s nuclear reactor, OPAL, for research and isotope production. Critical research carried out at ANSTO involves the neutron beam instruments attached to OPAL, run by ANSTO’s Bragg Institute, Australia’s leading neutron scattering research group. ANSTO operates particle accelerators to analyse the elemental composition and age of materials. ANSTO has two accelerators, ANTARES and STAR, both of which are used in ion beam analysis and accelerator mass spectrometry. Two new accelerators will be established, putting ANSTO at the forefront of this field worldwide. ANSTO is a founding partner in the national accelerator collaboration – Australian Collaboration for Accelerator Science (ACAS) – aimed at maintaining state-of-the-art facilities and a pool of accelerator experts. ANSTO is also one of the ten foundation investors in the Australian Synchrotron. As custodian of this world-class infrastructure, ANSTO attracts scientists from around the world to use the facilities. Approximately three hundred scientists use ANSTO’s neutron beam instuments each year, enabling productive collaborations, and keeping Australia at the forefront of scientific discovery. ANSTO researchers are engaged in international research through reciprocal arrangements with many organisations. Agreements for collaborations have recently been signed with the French Atomic Energy Commission, the Korean Atomic Energy Research Institute and CERN, home of the Large Hadron Collider in Switzerland