On July 20, 2018, CSNS successfully completed the first-round operation, and began the first summer maintenance.

At the end of August 2017, CSNS entered the trial operation stage after obtaining the neutron beam for the first time. Great progress has been made on the commissioning of the accelerator. As a result, the beam power was increased gradually as planed. Presently the average beam power exceeds 20 kW, with a stable pulse repetition rate at 25 Hz, and the target station has been running continuously for more than 4,600 hours.

Looking back in the first round, CSNS has achieved a series of important results. The initial three instruments have conducted 21 user sample experiments from 16 research groups. Among the three, the general purpose powder diffractometer (GPPD) has outstanding performance. On April 17, 2018, the result of the first user experiment on GPPD was published on Nano Energy. On June 14, scientists published another article on Energy Storage Materials, a top international journal in energy industry. These two articles have been highly praised by the international peers especially in the neutron scattering community, indicating that the performance of GPPD has reached the international advanced level.