Australia’s science and research priorities: conversation starter

ANSTO’s contribution to the consultation on the

Refreshed National Science and Research Priorities

What are Australia’s greatest:

Challenges that science could help to address?

Health and Medicine:

Improve fundamental understanding of causes of illness and disease to enable accurate prediction, diagnosis, therapy

Personalised medicine and medical devices (related to above) – a vision of a society where the top ten killer diseases are eliminated

Sovereign supply of radioisotopes for medical, industrial, environmental applications

Improve delivery of medical services to regional Australia through technology so health outcomes do not depend on postcode

Pandemic resilience: local medicine production; local manufacturing of protective equipment

Ageing population: health cost; palliative care; targeted medicine; genetic medicine; imaging and diagnostics; nutrition

Health advances to keep up with an ageing society and the wellbeing of Australians

Shortening the drug discovery pipeline

Advanced manufacturing and innovation:

Reviving manufacturing industry: engineering; mineral processing; advanced manufacturing; advanced materials; pharmaceuticals

International competition for resources: recycling; new manufacturing methods; advanced manufacturing

Transition to advanced manufacturing – material and process development

Advanced manufacturing, mechatronics, artificial intelligence for industry and medicine

Building an innovation and commercialisation ecosystem

Support removing inefficiencies in industries and promotion of innovation to better tackle industrial challenges

Climate change and environment:

Environmental sustainability, global warming, climate change, clean water/water conservation, and the current issues we face with respect to environmental changes

Agricultural sustainability and food safety / traceability

Water resource sustainability. Maintaining adequate quantity and quality of water resource to meet the needs of Australia’s people, environment, agriculture, and industry. Groundwater is a particularly challenge because it is hidden underground and isn’t easily measured and monitored. Clever science is therefore needed to quantify this resource and identify the threats to it due to mining, pollution and over use, as well as the way that climate change may affect this

Defence and National Security:

Geo-political tensions: mass migrations; defence readiness; cyber security

Sensing technology for civil and defence applications

Energy:

Energy (clean energy sources; transition from fossil sources); Agriculture (soil, water, resilient crops); construction industry (new building standards for fire, flood, hot weather)

The ongoing Energy crisis facing Australia and the wider world with the move away from fossil fuels and greater focus on the Environment

Australia’s energy needs are mostly met by fossil fuels (like coal and natural gas). Other available energy resources in Australia, such as Uranium, Thorium along with renewables resources (wind and sun) can diversify the energy sector and provide a perfect Energy balance for long-term goals

Energy production, supply, and storage, including batteries

Carbon capture and storage supporting the transition to renewable energy

Waste:

Sovereign capability to reprocess nuclear waste to extract value prior to disposal

Radioactive waste disposal – from a lifecycle perspective – acquiring/producing waste, decommissioning, storage and disposal. Characterisation to understand what we have to do (engineering designs/new materials) to store waste safely for 100+ years.

Indigenous:

Address the gap between indigenous and non-indigenous population: education science and political science

Opportunities we should seize?

Identify the need for, and build, a science workforce capable of meeting the challenges above, including attracting the brightest to study STEMM, and retaining those already supporting Australian science and research.

The access to quality science education in schools should not depend on postcode or parental wealth

Leverage ancillary opportunities/supporting functions (engineering – materials and nuclear, waste disposal etc) related to AUKUS

Partnerships with countries with similar interest and share technologies

New technologies/engineering skillset/research to deploy the energy resources available in Australia

Critical mineral value chain – exploration to active materials

Renewable energy technologies

Export scale hydrogen

Strengths we should maintain or build?

More research into renewable energies and associated technologies. AI and Robotics for nuclear medicine manufacturing

Nuclear expertise to support Australia, enhancing nuclear knowledge base and subject matter experts

Provide better organised career paths for mid-career professionals, particularly females in Engineering

Innovation capability and manufacturing independence, keep supporting and further developing advanced manufacturing

Strong mineral processing expertise and technology base in Australia

Sovereign capability for Hot Isostatic Pressing (HIP) to support advanced manufacturing and medical device production

Sovereign capability for radiation hardness testing supporting (aero)space and defence projects

Does Australia have the capability and capacity needed to address these challenges, opportunities, and strengths? If not, how could we build this?

Australia could build its capability and capacity further by:

Re-shaping the education system: universities, TAFE, and high schools, accelerating STEM education

Growing our capabilities in nuclear knowledge - increased capacity, more knowledge sharing, increased study and career opportunities.

Attracting talented people from younger age to science, technology and engineering and retaining them

New skills will need to be developed to cover emerging areas of interest. Eg: Skills are not readily transferable in the nuclear space (for example, nuclear expert in a hospital setting, i.e nuclear medicine) not readily transferable to expert in nuclear engineering or nuclear waste or nuclear policy etc. Need to identify target/focus areas and execute on that.

More investment in fundamental and applied science: the role of science is crucial in building up the capacity to deal with the challenges identified. Both fundamental and applied sciences are an indispensable tool to find solutions to future problems brought by those challenges.

Facilitating entrepreneurships: financial, legal, technical: this plays a critical role in translating applied science into practical solutions, products, services. In Australia this activity is weak and to boost it, specific skills must be built up, to span financial aspect of raising capital, legal aspects of start-ups, as well as broader technical knowledge, all geared up to understand the economic potential of specific scientific and technical ideas, and to be able to turn them into products and services.

Having bipartisan support on key issues to fast-track capability and capacity development

Industry-wide collaboration between public and private sector to share ideas

Sovereign capability for Hot Isostatic Pressing:

HIP has become the final processing stage of additive manufactured products where the advantage of microstructure control, densification and defect mitigation can be realised, resulting in better performance in products. This technique is also mandated in specific sectors to ensure that parts meet regulatory requirements.

Currently most large-scale additive parts need to be shipped overseas for HIP treatment. It is not practical for each manufacturer (particularly SMEs) to own and operate their own vertically integrated HIP facilities, what is needed is a national approach that can address the commercial demand for HIP. This capability compliments ANSTO’s extensive suite of instruments and techniques for testing and validation of newly engineered materials, which include prototype testing and performance testing of final products. ANSTO has the largest HIP available in Australia and HIP is becoming an increasingly important part of the post-processing treatment of additive manufactured parts for defence, aerospace and medical applications – with an increase in the size of parts requiring HIP as well as the number of parts produced using additive techniques.

ANSTO has over 30 years of operating experience in hot isostatic pressing. The major focus of our work has been the development of Synroc, a nuclear waste processing technology using HIP to consolidate powders into durable solid products. In conjunction with our projects, we have leveraged our knowledge and experience in materials and process development in other industries and application areas including defence, aerospace and medical.

Sovereign capability for radiation hardness testing

Australia with its advantageous launch position in the southern hemisphere, stable political climate, and close alliances with advanced space-faring nations is poised as never before, to take its place in the space economy currently worth more than $400bn a year.

Most Australian companies currently aspiring to supply high-tech hardware, software and integrated systems into the global space supply chain have little or no experience with radiation hardness testing. This is an essential consideration for any successful implementation in significant space operations. The world-wide capacity for this type of testing is stretched with significant delays felt by even large aerospace companies overseas. Making this testing available, timely and affordable will remove a significant barrier to entry for smaller Australian companies.

Australia has the resources and is developing skill sets in renewable energy sectors like Wind and Solar, but there is a lot to be done to address the issue.

Are the principles the right principles to shape the priorities?

The principles look good and balanced, and they seem adequate to determine the priorities.