‘The bomb factory’: Living in the shadow of Sydney’s nuclear reactor (2024)

Brian Benson might, as the crow flies, have the closest home to Australia’s only nuclear reactor. Along Sierra Road, in a bushy corner of Engadine on Sydney’s southern fringe, the white buildings of the Australian Nuclear Science and Technology Organisation’s (ANSTO) Lucas Heights facility are visible from backyard balconies.

“It doesn’t faze me, you know, the nuclear reactor, whatever. If there’s a war and that gets blown up, we go with it,” Benson muses. “But it’s not on our mind.”

This suburb wouldn’t be the only one living in the shadow of a nuclear reactor under Opposition Leader Peter Dutton’s plan to build seven nuclear power stations, from Lithgow to the Latrobe Valley.

Living alongside nuclear has become mundane for residents here, but the reactor brewing about a kilometre away on the other side of the valley also serves to exemplify the risks of radioactivity, from mounting stockpiles of waste to the odd radiation burn.

“Oh yeah, they call it ‘the bomb factory’,” says another nearby resident who didn’t want to be named, shrugging and leaning on her garden rake. “I can tell you we don’t glow green.”

But the question of waste plays on her mind. Australia doesn’t have the capability to process the spent nuclear rods extracted from ANSTO’s reactor each month, so they’re kept in cooling pools on site and, every few years, shipped to France for recycling.

The radioactive leftovers of that process return to Australia in a dramatic affair that sees the bushy highway running through Lucas Heights flare up with flashing police lights.

In 2015, when 25 tonnes of waste returned to Australia at sea under police guard, anti-nuclear protesters swarmed the ship on rubber dinghies as it pulled into Port Kembla.

Another four 500-kilogram canisters of radioactive waste returned to ANSTO in 2021. And it has nowhere to go.

The hot-potato question of where Australia would construct a permanent, central, national storage site for nuclear waste, which is produced now by ANSTO, soon by AUKUS submarines and one day, potentially, by nuclear power stations, has been contested for years.

Last year, several state governments baulked at federal plans to establish nuclear waste sites within their borders and the federal court nixed a plan to build a storage facility at Kimba in South Australia after a successful revolt by the region’s traditional owners, the Barngarla people.

And this so-far intractable problem has been caused by a relatively tiny amount of nuclear waste produced by ANSTO’s reactor. The radioactive problem produced by seven nuclear power stations would be worse by several magnitudes.

The Open-pool Australian lightwater reactor (OPAL) at Lucas Heights is a very different beast to a reactor intended to drive nuclear power, says ANU honorary professor Tony Irwin, who managed the reactor during its early years. OPAL is a “neutron factory” that runs cool, meaning if the reactor surpasses 60 degrees, control rods plunge into the core to disrupt the nuclear fission in half a second.

“It’s completely the opposite to a power reactor, which is a big kettle,” Irwin says. “You want as much temperature as you can to produce steam.”

OPAL is made up of a 13 metre-deep pool with a core at the bottom the size of a two-drawer filing cabinet, which hosts 16 rods of uranium fuel. The reactor only generates about 20 megawatts of heat compared to nuclear power stations in the UK, which produce about 1200 megawatts, and the 300 megawatts produced by the small modular reactors spruiked by Dutton that are not yet commercially viable. The scale of a large nuclear power facility is similar to that of a coal-fired power station, Irwin said.

OPAL underpins Australia’s nuclear medicine capabilities. The reactor is used to create Molybdenum-99, for example, a substance which decays into Technetium-99m, a radioactive metal critical for cancer diagnosis.

The government announced construction of a new nuclear medicine factory last year to replace the current ageing facility, which has been hit by several safety incidents. That included a worker who suffered radiation burns and blistered hands, despite wearing two pairs of gloves, when they dropped a vial of Molybdenum-99 in 2017.

OPAL is primarily a research reactor, and it’s often harnessed by international experts for their experiments, says ANSTO scientist Dr Floriana Salvemini. She uses the neutron beams produced by OPAL to peer into ancient statues and samurai swords, parsing long-lost manufacturing techniques from the metal.

“I’ve worked here for 10 years and have always felt safe,” Salvemini says, although working in buildings close to the reactor requires wearing digital radiation monitors and an airport-style body scan on the way out to check for radioactive contamination.

Two workers helping run ANSTO’s bustling café are similarly unfazed and love working in a place flush with scientists and schoolkids. “Sometimes you ask someone what they’re doing today and they’re like, ‘I can’t tell you’,” says the cafe’s Nicole Brooks.

Her colleague Hayley Wood has lived in the area since the 1980s and remembers when security around the reactor was much more lax. Since the September 11 attacks, security gates and fences cropped up around the facility and, in 2004, a 30-metre steel cage was built around the reactor building to shield it from aeroplane strikes.

While some residents here have embraced ANSTO, many are less enthusiastic about the prospect of nuclear power.

“I don’t know why we need to do that,” Benson of Sierra Road says. “We’ve got vacant land everywhere, an abundance of it, why can’t we do solar stations and windmills, rather than putting those big exhaust pipes?”

Irwin, who’s the technical director of a company that consults on small modular reactors, says with time, people would get on board with nuclear power despite the costs and risks.

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“If you talk to people in the UK, the people most in favour of it are the people closest to it because they’ve got the jobs, they’ve got all the economic benefits from nuclear power stations,” he says.

“We’ve been a nuclear nation since 1958,” he says, referring to the construction of OPAL’s predecessor, HIFAR. “We’re not starting from scratch.”

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