eurOpean platForm For accEssing nucleaR R&d facilities

Project Information

OFFERR

Grant agreement ID: 101060008

EC signature date 9 June 2022

Start date 1 September 2022

End date 31 August 2026

Funded under

• Euratom Research and Training Programme (EURATOM)

Total cost

€ 9 574 855,64

EU contribution

€ 8 999 918,75

Coordinated by

ELECTRICITE DE FRANCE
France

Periodic Reporting for period 1 - OFFERR (eurOpean platForm For accEssing nucleaR R&d facilities)

Reporting period: 2022-09-01 to 2023-08-31

Summary of the context and overall objectives of the project

OFFERR project takes place in the context of the closure of numerous experimental resources in Europe in the nuclear field. The main objective of the OFFERR project is to help key infrastructures by financing experimental activities.

Once this context is established, the main objectives of the OFFERR project can be clearly understood:
- setup a network of european facilities in the nulcear field,
- design a mechanism for calling, reviewing and financing experiments on this network,
- collaborate with other initiatives to promote the project and to learn from the feedback of other comparable international initiatives.

The OFFERR project as a budget of 7.2 M€ to fund new experiments. From a practical point of view, the challenge is to build the critical infrastructure network and develop a sufficiently attractive and simple call mechanism. From a strategic point of view, the difficulty consists of bringing critical infrastructures useful to the field into the network and fairly distributing funding across the different sub-domains.

Beyond the scientific and technical benefits, the OFFERR project must also be able to contribute to the training of new researchers and education programs. In this area, collaboration with the ENEN++ project is envisaged.

Work performed from the beginning of the project to the end of the period covered by the report and main results achieved so far

During this first period of the project, many concrete results were produced:
- The network of european facilities has been designed and setup and the first two editions of the OFFERR infrastructure catalogue have been published. The network is made of more than 200 facilities.
- The process allowing, through a call for projects, to propose experiments to be financed has been defined.
- A dedicated web platform has been developped and two calls have been launched: call 1 was closed in may 2023 with 4 eligible applications and call 2 will be closed in september (after the first period) with an expected number of 20 applications.
- The review process has been defined and the application of call 1 have been evaluated.

Progress beyond the state of the art and expected potential impact (including the socio-economic impact and the wider societal implications of the project so far)

The impacts of the project in Europe in the nuclear field are starting to be felt:
- European researchers know the existence of the OFFERR network and ask the project to be part of it.
- Thanks to the first calls for projects, new collaborations are built between teams who did not know each other before.

Because we are still at the beginning of the project, the first experiments of the applications have not yet been launched and we can not comunicate explicitely on the concrete impacts of these works.