France-based nuclear start-up Naarea (Nuclear Abundant Affordable Resourceful Energy for All) Naarea has opened its industrial test facility and laboratory, the I-Lab, in Cormeilles-en-Parisis. This 2,400 m2 site will be used to conduct non-nuclear tests and experiments to support the development of its XAMR microreactor.
Naarea, founded in 2020 by Jean-Luc Alexandre and Ivan Gavriloff, is developing the XAMR (eXtrasmall Advanced Modular Reactor), a molten salt fast neutron micro-generator (40MWe or 80MWt). The company has received support from the French Alternative Energies & Atomic Energy Commission (CEA) and CNRS, as well as industry players such as Assystem, Dassault Systèmes, Orano and Framatome.
I-Lab will host a team of around 20 Naarea engineers as well as experimentation facilities to validate the non-nuclear environment of the technologies that will be used in Naarea’s microreactors (pumps, gas systems, materials, valves, chemical processes, sensors, actuators, etc.) and their modes of operation.
The facility will have three main areas:
- An industrial area for the production of coolant salts, prototyping, assembly and automated tests, and the validation of the future digital architecture of Naarea’s production facilities.
- A testing area dedicated to the operation of experimentation facilities designed to validate the thermohydraulic components for the XAMR. These facilities will primarily include test loops and testbeds on various scales.
- An area composed of three specialised laboratories: a materials laboratory dedicated to studying corrosion and mechanical behaviour; a chemistry and analysis laboratory for the development of methods, processes and analysis of materials and their level of purity; a gas laboratory for the development of the XAMR gas systems (filtration of noble gases, drying of inerting gases, enrichment and treatment of chlorine gases, etc.).
The testing area will support the testing and validation of the ALIS project instrumentation. ALIS is a joint project undertaken by Naarea, CNRS-IJCLab and iUMTEK which was granted support from France 2030 and the Île-de-France Region for its first phase. Its aim is to develop analytical tools that will help ensure maximum safety and optimised control of the future XAMR microreactor.
Tests conducted using the full-size test loops at the I-Lab will be used to validate the studies and calculations performed by the engineering teams, test innovative processes and materials and develop the technical documentation being prepared for the French Authority for Nuclear Safety and Radiation Protection (ASNR – L’Autorité de sûreté nucléaire et de radioprotection. ASNR began operation on 1st January 2025. It is the result of the merger of the Autorité de sûreté nucléaire (ASN) and the Institut de radioprotection et de sûreté nucléaire (IRSN).
