High-assay low-enriched uranium metal (HALEU) is a critical resource required for the operation of research reactors and the production of pharmaceutical radioisotopes. Its availability is essential for advancing nuclear energy safety, materials science, basic scientific research, and the performance of about 40 million nuclear medicine procedures worldwide each year. Until recently, EU has relied on Russia and the USA for its supply of HALEU. Russian supplies are expected to be unavailable for an extended period, and the future availability of US supplies remains uncertain: it is thus imperative for EU to establish its own HALEU production capacity. The PreP-HALEU initiative represents a preparatory phase aimed at producing essential components and evaluating the technical pathways for establishing this capacity in EU. This project consortium brings together all key stakeholders, including enrichment companies, fuel manufacturers, research organizations, and medical radioisotope producers. Through this collaborative effort, PreP-HALEU intends to: • Generate substantial technical, economic, and regulatory information to support the decision-making process. • Foster alignment among the countries and parties involved in establishing a EU HALEU capability as a shared asset. Within the framework of PreP-HALEU, the quantitative requirements for HALEU metal will be updated, and working groups will delve into enrichment, metallization, and transportation considerations. The integration of these elementary bricks will be extensively discussed to create a coherent project dynamic and consistently consolidate results into an executive summary, a key input for the decision-making phase. The PreP-HALEU project, initiated in response to the NRT01-11 call for proposals, is a cornerstone in the establishment of a EU production capacity for metal HALEU. It plays a pivotal role in securing activities in the fields of research, healthcare, and innovation throughout EU.

RISCAPE will provide systematic, focused, high quality, comprehensive, consistent and peer-reviewed international landscape analysis report on the position and complementarities of the major European research infrastructures in the international research infrastructure landscape. To achieve this, RISCAPE will establish a close links with a stakeholder panel representing the main user groups of the report, including representatives from ESFRI, the OECD and Member state funding agencies to ensure usability and the focus of the Report. It will also benefit from close co-operation with other projects and initiatives in the European research infrastructures development to ensure consistency with the existing landscape work. Particularly, RISCAPE builds on the European Research Infrastructures (RIs) in the ESFRI landscape report (2016) and on the landscape analysis done or currently underway in the H2020 cluster projects. RISCAPE leverages the experts on the European RIs with extensive knowledge on the disciplines involved and RI development in Europe and the project benefits from the contacts and tools developed in the cluster- and international RI collaboration projects to maximize the discipline-specific usability of the results. A key factor in the RISCAPE analysis is that the complementarities will be analyzed in a way which is natural and suitable for the discipline and RI in question. The resulting Report and the used methods will be independently peer reviewed to maximize the usability and objectivity of the information provided for the EU strategic RI development and policy. The project answers directly to the European Commission strategy on EU international cooperation in research and innovation, particularly on the need to obtain objective information in order to help implement the (EC) strategic approach.

In the framework of the joint international efforts to reduce the risk of proliferation by minimising the use of highly enriched uranium, a new research reactor fuel based on uranium-molybdenum (UMo) alloys is being developed by the HERACLES group. HERACLES is composed of AREVA-CERVA, CEA, ILL, SCK•CEN and TUM, all organisations with a long-standing history in fuel manufacturing and qualification. HERACLES works towards the qualification of UMo fuels, based on a series of “comprehension” experiments and manufacturing developments. There are two types of UMo fuel fine particles dispersed in an Al matrix, and monolithic foils. The qualification phase of these fuels is scheduled to begin in 2019; the project will prepare the way with an initial comprehension phase, to improve our understanding of the fuels’ irradiation behaviour and consequent the manufacturing/industrialisation process. One of the key components in the project is the SEMPER FIDELIS irradiation test, which aims at investigating the fuel swelling phenomenon and the effects of coating, with a view to arriving at procedures for fuel engineering. The challenges as regards manufacture lie in the basic elements of both fuel types’ production process and plate manufacturing. For the dispersed fuel, this includes the pin casting for the rotating electrode process and the atomization process itself. For the monolithic fuel, this concerns the development of coating for the foils. All these components are essential to prepare the fuel qualification phase. High-performance research reactors are at the start of the supply chain for medical isotopes like 99Mo. Successful conversion to lower enriched and where possible LEU fuel is therefore a key element in the mitigation of the risks surrounding the supply of isotopes as demanded by NFRP 8. However, the role of the HPRRs is far broader, as they are providing scientific and engineering solutions to questions of high societal importance.

The proposal addresses some important questions, which are at the forefront of particle and nuclear physics and concern the analysis of possible deviations from the Standard Model (SM) of particle physics. As a tool for the test of the SM we propose to use quantum interference experiments with the neutron. The aim of the theoretical part of this project is the analysis of all reliable candidates for physics beyond the Standard Model, which effectively can be measured with a special setup of this experiment as well as the investigations of the obtained results concerning their relation to other fundamental properties of particle physics. These theories can also be selected according to their predictions for the electric dipole moment of the neutron, the appearance of which is a direct consequence of the violation of CP-invariance. A particle, which both is responsible for a CP-violating coupling and a hot-topic dark matter candidate, is the axion. The experiments will therefore search for axion-like interactions at short distances right in the so called axion-window at 10-4 m or below, where the only limits so far are derived from our previous experiments. The newly developed “Gravity Resonance Technique” will improve limits by orders of magnitude, at least two. Best limits can be derived with polarized neutrons, and methods will be developed within this programme. The advantage of the new technique is that an unknown quantity – the energy – is assigned a measured frequency. Any energy change provoked by hypothetical axion fields in the quantum states of neutrons in the gravity potential can now be related to frequency measurements with unprecedented accuracy. A hypothetical axion coupling leads to a potential which is proportional to the 5th force potential and will change the energy states as a function of the range of this coupling. These statements can be generalized: The deviations are expected to be the phenomenological outcome of more fundamental theories, unifying all forces induced shortly after the Big Bang. Such a grand unification is an extension of the SM, containing new symmetry concepts based on supersymmetric and super-gravitational interactions. In turn, supersymmetric theories, describing interactions of point-like particles, can be part of more general theories such as string, superstring and D-brane theories. These theories predict new extra dimensions less than a millimeter in size, which can be picked up in the neutron interferometry q-bouncing experiments, measuring the phase shift of the wave function of the neutron.