 In 1955, Oliphant initiated the design and construction of a 500 megajoule homopolar generator (HPG), the world's largest. This massive machine contained three discs 3.5 metres (11 ft) in diameter and weighing 38 tonnes (37 long tons). He obtained £ 40,000 (equivalent to A $ 1,000,000 in 2010) initial funding from the Australian Atomic Energy Commission. Completed in 1963, the HPG was intended to be the power source for a synchrotron, but this was not built. Instead, it was used to power the LT-4 Tokamak and a large-scale railgun that was used as a scientific instrument for experiments with plasma physics. It was decommissioned in 1985.
