One of the benefits of doing research inside the EU is the ability to collaborate across borders to maximize the use of scientific resources. In 2002, the EU Council established the European Strategy Forum on Research Infrastructures (ESFRI) to improve how this happens. Research infrastructure includes the facilities and services used by scientists, ranging from research vessels, telescopes, and synchrotrons to biological archives, libraries, and clean rooms. Inspired by the enormous success of one such infrastructure—the CERN particle collider in Switzerland—ESFRI’s aim is to solidify Europe as a leader in science and its management.

With an annual budget in the region of €10 billion for research infrastructures across Europe, according to 2008 data from European Research Infrastructures Development Watch, the potential is enormous. But the process of getting scientists to work together across different international facilities is also slow and laborious. It took four years for ESFRI to publish a roadmap for the development of the next generation of pan-European research infrastructures. By 2010, it contained 48 different projects across a range of scientific fields, of which 60% were implemented by the end of 2015.

In their latest roadmap, published in March 2016, ESFRI has added six new infrastructures to “fill in important gaps in the European science landscape,” according to the introduction to the roadmap written by outgoing ESFRI Chair John Womersley, Chief Executive of the Science and Technology Facilities Council, the United Kingdom’s funding agency for large-scale science facilities and national laboratories. Womersley was replaced by Giorgio Rossi, a professor of physics at the University of Milan, in July 2016.

Materials research is well represented in parts of the roadmap. “ESFRI has a strong portfolio of research infrastructures of direct relevance to materials science and engineering,” said Rossi. He added that “the most advanced sources of radiation for the study of the fundamental properties of materials at the nanoscale” is one research goal that has already been implemented with the support of the ESFRI framework.

Environmental science projects constitute a hefty 16% of the entire ESFRI portfolio. One new project is the European Research Infrastructure for the observation of Aerosol, Clouds, and Trace gases (ACTRIS), headquartered in Helsinki, which aims to understand the impact of such gases and particles on the stratosphere and upper troposphere. Developing methods to detect tiny concentrations of these substances requires materials expertise, according to Markku Kulmala, who directs the Division of Atmospheric Sciences of the Physics Department at the University of Helsinki.

Energy research is also heavily reflected in the new ESFRI roadmap. Part of the framework since 2008 is the European Carbon Dioxide Capture and Storage Laboratory (ECCSEL), a project with the aim of eliminating industrial carbon dioxide levels through carbon capture and storage, headquartered at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim. Its aim is to develop new carbon capture and storage facilities as well as upgrading old ones. ECCSEL has nine partner countries, which house 44 research facilities in total, including one at Tiller in Norway and another in Sotacarbo in Italy.

“Being part of ESFRI is important and has affected the project positively,” said Volker Röhling, Project Manager for ECCSEL. He adds that it has also helped in dealing with government departments in partner countries and with funding, marketing, and knowledge exchange between other ESFRI projects.

EU-SOLARIS, a research infrastructure for concentrated solar power, has been in the framework since 2010, headquartered at the Advanced Technology Centre for Renewable Energies in Seville, Spain. Operation is expected to start in 2020.

Another introduced in 2010 is the Multi-purpose Hybrid Research Reactor for High-tech Applications (MYRRHA), headquartered at SCK-CEN, the Belgian Nuclear Research Center in Mol, with partners in Scandinavia, France, and Germany, among others. The MYRRHA design innovatively brings together a nuclear reactor and a particle accelerator. The reactor itself has too little fissile material to maintain the chain reaction needed to produce power, so extra neutrons are provided by the particle accelerator. If successful, it could be used to transmute long-lived radioactive waste from nuclear power plants into shorter-lived waste, which could reduce the burden on nuclear-waste disposal.

“Our materials research teams are conducting a support research program addressing liquid metal embrittlement, liquid metal corrosion, irradiation embrittlement of classical austenitic nuclear steels but also some ferritic-martensitic steels,” said Hamid Aït Abderrahim, Director of the MYRRHA project.

He said that being part of ESFRI has helped the project draw greater financial support and access to international research networks. “The exposure and recognition of being an ESFRI project strongly increases the visibility of the project on a European and global scale.”

The hope is to have each ESFRI project implemented, or to have started construction of large capital-intensive installations, within 10 years.

One unanticipated stumbling block since the framework was announced in March is the United Kingdom’s decision to leave the EU. There is no doubt that this will have repercussions for some ESFRI projects. Röhling admits that this will affect his team in the long term because the UK is one of their partners. Kulmala similarly hopes that the “impact is minor.”

ESFRI President Giorgio Rossi, meanwhile, is optimistic. “International scientific collaboration is more resilient than other activities when political changes occur,” he said.

Originally published in MRS Bulletin.