From nuclear research to multidisciplinary research

Forty years ago, the North Rhine-Westphalian State Government founded the then Juelich Nuclear Research Center. After a growth period of the reactor engineering program until 1980, claiming a share of 42% of R and D resources, that share declined continuously to a present level of 8%. This development is an expression of the activities successfully completed in the past, of progress achieved in industrial reactor development, but also of the fact that the high temperature reactor, which had been run successfully for twenty years, failed as a technical scale THTR-300 version. The Center has reorientated its line of research in a process of structural reshuffle beginning some fifteen years ago and still going on. Information technology, materials research, life sciences, environmental research, and energy technology have become main activities of equal weight. Activities specific to nuclear reactors have been incorporated in this new line of work as nuclear safety research and work on safe repository storage. (orig.)