Oak Ridge reactor will be down for about a month

photo/Michael Patrick

Ron Crone of Oak Ridge National Laboratory said the High Flux Isotope Reactor would be shut down early Saturday and remain out of operation for 26 days. It’s another extended outage for work on reactor refurbishment and upgrades.

It also continues a pattern where the outages are longer than the operating cycle, and Crone said that will likely be the case for the rest of fiscal 2009. Two major refurbishment periods are planned in ’09, he said.

There’s quite a bit of work to do to help ensure the research reactor’s future, including the installation of new scientific instruments and replacing some old motors and pumps, Crone said. There’s also a limited number of people to do the upgrades and maintenance work, which extends the outages in some cases, he said.

In 2010 and thereafter, as most of the rehab work is accomplished, the lab probably will be able to increase the number of fuel cycles at HFIR, Crone said. That has to be good news for researchers who come to the Oak Ridge reactor to do neutron-scattering experiments.

http://blogs.knoxnews.com/knx/munger/2008/10/oak_ridge_reactor_will_be_down.html