Dear all,

We are contacting you in order to provide information about the Jules Horowitz Reactor (JHR) and on the status of the Jules Horowitz Operation Plan 2040 project (JHOP 2040) which are currently ongoing. The facility would be operational by the end of this decade. We would also kindly ask you to distribute this information.

Link to the reactor website: http://www-rjh.cea.fr/index.html
Link to the project website: JHR Operation Plan 2040 (jhop2040-h2020.eu)

The Jules Horowitz Reactor (JHR) is a reference international user facility to observe and understand material and fuel behaviour in extreme nuclear environment with irradiation loops reproducing the operational condition of the different power reactor technologies. Its primary uses will be research into the performance of nuclear fuel at existing reactors, testing of materials used in reactors, testing designs for fuel for future reactors and the production of radioisotopes used in medicine.

The scope of the Jules Horowitz Operation Plan 2040 (JHOP 2040) project is the creation of the operation planning (roadmap) for the JHR for the first 15 years (2030 – 2045) and to assure that EURATOM makes a proper and effective use of its 6% of the total Access Rights (ARs) to the JHR.

The 1st workshop on this project was held on September 15and 16th of 2021. The goal of this workshop was not only to give an update on the status of the construction of the reactor and to introduce the capabilities of the test devices, but also to discuss the areas of interest to stakeholders and to present the pre-JHR era. The report on the workshop can be found here. The 2nd workshop will take place in September 2022.

The project has progressed considerably in 2020 – 2021. By the end of 2023, the new cost assessment and the project plan have to be completed, but first criticality is not expected before the end of this decade.  A pre-JHR action has been set up in the FIDES frame to maintain the “JHR community” alive and to fill the gap (keep on ongoing activities) until the starting of operation. A roadmap for this pre-JHR era will be presented to the Governing Board in June 2022.

* The FIDES agreement (Framework for Irradiation Experiments: agreement on the OECD Nuclear Energy Agency – NEA) that provides stable, sustainable, reliable platform for fuel and material testing, was launched in March 2021 with 27 parties on board (from 12 countries and the EC).

Within this frame, we would kindly ask you to distribute this information to all the institutions that you consider as potentially interested in participating. They are welcome to contact us for any questions.

Many thanks,

Best regards,

Iuliana Mihai

European Commission

DG Joint Research Centre (JRC)