The EASI-SMR project intends to address the safety issues related to the LW-SMR in order to provide advances that should support implementation of such technologies as soon as possible. The EASI SMR project activities are aimed at ensuring that these reactors will be designed, constructed, commissioned and operated in the safest possible way and in accordance with existing regulations. The consortium was carefully chosen so that the research entities can provide the necessary research teams and support facilities across the European Continent and beyond. EASI-SMR will address the safety issues associated with major LW-SMR innovations: • Passive systems • Soluble Boron-free cores • Co-generation and hybridation • Additive manufacturing to improve compactness of Nuclear Steam Supply System • Multi-units operation The work aims to provide insights for European LW-SMR projects, in particular: • NUWARD SMR, a French design of a reactor generating 170 MW of electricity production. • LDR-50, a Finnish design of a district heating reactor of 50 MW EASI-SMR is closely linked with NUGENIA TA6 and the European SMR pre-Partnership’s WS5.

Shortening the time-to market of the LFR technology is an ambitious, but undeniably important factor to attract additional investments, thanks to the lower initial risk, added flexibility, and faster return of experience. Industries and utilities sharing the vision of a competitive LFR of a small and medium-size with modular features will be attracted by the compressed deployment roadmap, and will play a leverage role at national and European level, strengthening synergies and creating public–private–partnership opportunities. In this context, the European community working on the LFR development and deployment assumed the commitment, among others, to highlight the technical open issues and existing research infrastructures, aiming to support the R&D phase through European, national and in-kind contribution of the involved partners. The aim of the LESTO project is moving on along the depicted roadmap, aiming at further developing the LFR technology, supporting the demonstration that LFRs can be designed, sited, constructed, commissioned and operated in line with the requirements of the actual safety standards, with particular focus on their safety features and passive safety systems. Along the project the most relevant facilities in Europe and UK will be adopted to implement a large and very comprehensive experimental database for code validation, safety assessment and component/system demonstration. Among the others, it is worth to mention the large-scale pool type ATHENA facility, being commissioned in Romania, the CIRCE pool in Italy, as well as MELECOR in UK. These facilities, with the support of research infrastructure in Belgium, Germany and Sweden represent the state of art for the LFR R&D. Large emphasis will be devoted to transient analysis in large pools, allowing the community to cross the death valley from laboratory to industry scale.

ELSMOR (towards European Lisencing of Small MOdular Reactors) aims to create methods and tools for the European stakeholders to assess and verify the safety of light water small modular reactors (LW-SMR) that would be deployed in Europe. ELSMOR advances the understanding and technological solutions pertaining to light water SMRs on several fronts: • Collection, analysis, and dissemination of the information on the potential and challenges of Small Modular Reactors to various stakeholders, including the public, decision makers and regulators. • Development of the high level methods to assess the safety of LW-SMRs • Improvement of the European experimental research infrastructure to assist in the evaluation of the novel safety features of the future LW-SMRs. • Improvement of the European nuclear safety analysis codes to demonstrate the capability to assess the safety of the future LW-SMRs Establishing education and training in the field of innovative nuclear reactors for young professionals is also emphasized. The ELSMOR project is built upon the expertise of the consortium that consists of technical support organizations, technical research centres, industrial partners, and universities with the long experience in European nuclear safety analysis and the development and implementation of innovative nuclear technologies. The industrial partners include utilities, small medium sized enterprises as well as the consortium currently developing the French LW-SMR (F-SMR design). The developers of European safety analysis tools and other computer codes use their well-established paths for exploitation of the improved and validated simulation tools. The licencing approaches and methods would be expected to be directly utilized by SMR designers like the French consortium. The outcomes should make the licensing process more fluid and comprehensive; this should also be true from the regulator point of view.

PIACE has the main objective to support the technology transfer from the research to industry in the area of safety of nuclear installations. An Innovative Decay Heat Removal System for nuclear reactors, presently under technology validation in relevant environment (SIRIO facility), will be scaled-up to achieve a system prototype demonstration in operational environment, relevant for LFRs/ADSs and LWRs.