It’s official – on April 6 we move into our brand new premises!
Thanks to our dedicated construction, engineering and architectural team we have a state-of-the-art building to not only house our two new shiny cyclotrons but to keep the entire PETNET team working efficiently and safely under the one roof. And, what a wonderful and ingenious building it is!
To give you an overview, the building is segregated into 6 zones for air handling to prevent any cross contamination. There are the office and entrance areas, the vault, the clean room, the laboratory, the packing area and despatch. Each operates at a different pressure and there are lots of interlocks and barriers to prevent access without authorisation or cross contamination of one area to another.
Shane Harrison, Installation Manager for the ANSTO Neutron Beam Instrument Project and Construction Coordinator for the Replacement Research Reactor Project, has been Project Manager on the PETNET site from the onset overseeing all aspects from design and engineering to construction. Shane believes good design is all about getting the necessary separation into the building without it affecting the ambiance of the site. “The architects have achieved this with the use of glass to open out the separated areas. Through clever design, they have allowed a sense of integration and face to face communication for the entire team, even though they are separated in different rooms due to the requirements of working in a laboratory or manufacturing area,” he says.
The office area though small is also very much a bridge from the outside – the randomly landscaped Australian bush – to the workplace of a desk in a modern air-conditioned office. And, in the case where operations start in the dark hours, it provides a really interesting visual uplift.
The vault itself is large enough for two full size shielded Eclipse HP cyclotrons and their associated electronics. Everything is protected by a high-tech interlocked safety system that is designed to prevent accidental exposure of any staff. The cyclotrons also have additional shielding to keep the occupational levels down close to background even when fully operating. The tunnels under the slab are deeply imbedded to keep the dose low in the seconds it takes to travel from the target to the receiving cell. The cells (8) are all shielded with over 75 mm of lead and are also interlocked into the production safety system to ensure that there can be no exposure from an accidental opening.
The despatch and shipping areas also have additional shielding to keep the exposure levels as low as reasonably attainable. Shipping containers are also double shielded to reduce the transport dose and make receipt by our customers easier. One of the challenges of designing and constructing a building that houses a cyclotron was to create a ‘green friendly’ structure. “It’s difficult to provide a completely green facility when the air has to be used once and the main production uses a cyclotron, however the building otherwise is a paragon of virtue in the green stakes,” says Shane. “Everything from the extensive use of steel in the construction, the high levels of wall and ceiling insulation to the use of the building’s thermal inertia are optimised for efficient production.”
And as John Hodder says, “This is the prettiest building I have ever been fated to work in.”