At the Large Hadron Collider, collisions of heavy ions achieve an extremely high energy density such that a thermalized medium of quarks and gluons, a Quark Gluon Plasma (QGP), is produced. Over the last several years, the heavy ion program at the ATLAS experiment has achieved great success studying heavy ion collisions.  This program has focused on hadronic collisions observed at mid-rapidity, with forward rapidity measurements playing only a supporting role.  Recently interest has grown in collisions in which the accelerated ion beams are considered as a beam of quasi-real photons due to the EM fields of the ion beams.  For robust identification such collisions, both photon-photon and photo-nuclear, as well as diffractive nuclear collisions require detector acceptance at forward rapidity and this in turn requires upgrading the detector capabilities.  The measurements of interest as well as plans for upgrading the detector, in particular a radiation hard photon and neutron detector for forward rapidity will be presented.