The Institute of Nuclear & Radiological Sciences and Technology, Energy & Safety (INRASTES) is the largest Institute of the National Centre for Scientific Research “Demokritos” (NCSR “D”) in terms of infrastructure and the second largest in terms of number of personnel.
INRASTES has been established in April 2012 as the result of a merger between the former Institute of Nuclear Technology & Radiation Protection and the former Institute of Radioisotopes & Radiodiagnostic Products (INT-RP & IRRP, respectively). In fact, INT-RP, an interdisciplinary Institute with a large part of its scientific activities centered around Nuclear Technology, Energy / Environmental Technologies and Radiation Protection, was merged with IRRP, also an interdisciplinary Institute with a focus on Molecular Radiopharmacy and Biodiagnostics.
The new entity is a multidisciplinary research Institution pursuing basic, translational and applied research to address challenges of great scientific and socioeconomic impact in a broad spectrum of scientific and technological fields. With its highly qualified staff and large scale, unique nationwide facilities, INRASTES satisfies the necessary conditions and possesses the potential to achieve critical masses and direct synergies among the various labs and research groups under wide thematic areas creating significant growth prospects and bringing clear socio-economic benefits.
Following the merger process, a great effort has been undertaken by the INRASTES staff to establish the framework for the operation and prospects of the new Institute. The various activities have been organized in four thematic areas (divisions):

All these thematic areas share a common background in Physical Sciences and are in line with both the Horizon 2020 priorities and the national smart specialization areas. This lineup and direct relevance of activities allows for an effective exploitation of one of the main advantages of the new Institute: namely, its capacity to pursue the development of vertical, interdisciplinary (with respect to know-how and infrastructure) activities that lead to integrated approaches and applications in the areas of interest. In this way, the great challenges that the new Institute faces with regard to the convergence of seemingly disparate research programs and activities  with quite broad scopes and aims can be turned into an opportunity for close synergies and interactions, creation of critical masses and promotion of innovation in a well defined set of targeted and focused topics. These topics fall under two main National smart specialization priorities, Energy / Environment and Health / Pharmaceutics. In that context, the recent merging of the two Institutes is expected to better coordinate and strengthen the interactions between the various research groups and maximize outcome.

Besides the above two major poles of future INRASTES development, a third pole of continuous interest for the Institute is the exploitation of research results via the provision of advanced R&D services to the public and private sectors with great impact to policy making and decision processes, the industry and the society. Indeed, a substantial part of the total income of INRASTES comes from such specialized services mainly within the country but also internationally. This indicates the inclination of the Institute's personnel towards exploitation of the research results.
Specifically, the INRASTES Laboratories offering specialized scientific services include:

A large number of these Labs are accredited under ISO and EN while some act as National Reference Labs.