Research reactors are quite different from power reactors used to generate electricity.
Nuclear medicine is one of the fastest growing fields in modern medicine.
It has been growing at some 14 per cent a year for the past five years. On current projections, one in every two Australians can expect to have a nuclear medicine procedure in their lifetime. Large ingots, each a single crystal of silicon, are inserted into the reactor. There, the neutrons change one atom of silicon in every 1,000 million to phosphorus. Studies of the chemical structures and magnetic properties of materials are made using neutron diffraction or scattering techniques.