Life after the moratorium

In Serbia, after almost four decades, the Law on Prohibition of Construction was finally repealed nuclear power plants, known as the Moratorium. It happened under very unusual conditions and for our circumstances - although it continuously, over the years, caused strong polemics about the nuclear future of Serbia, the Moratorium was lifted so that no one noticed it, not even the deputies at the session in the House of the National Assembly, regardless of whether are the government or the opposition. The irony is that, at the same time, the event in the parliament during the debate on the Moratorium was not secret, but on the contrary, it was not only recorded, but then broadcast in all the news, on all televisions (truthfully, with a different political message), as well as on powerful portals. and all social networks. And although it was seen by millions, hardly anyone realized how the super-viral video from the parliament shows the lifting of the Moratorium on nuclear energy.

This strange situation, almost similar to the one with Schrödinger's cat, happened in the midst of protests that are shaking Serbia this fall after the big accident that happened at the railway station in Novi Sad. Along with the growth of popular discontent, as well as the largest student protest in the last three decades, the second session of the Second Regular Session of the National Assembly was scheduled for November 25, with an extremely large number of items on the agenda, the first of which discussed the Budget for 2025.

The opposition decided to use this opportunity to stage a performance and thereby allegedly make it difficult for the government to adopt the budget. The cunning plan turned into a general brawl, and the speaker of the parliament called a break. However, a little later, after the incident, the session continued in a rare bizarre way. The members of the opposition climbed into the space in front of the lectern and made noise with different means, while the Speaker of the Parliament competed with boos and whistles, opening and closing the discussion in principle and details on each of the points. There was no discussion, and the viral video of the shouting went out to the public. However, in this event, a whole series of laws appeared which, born in the general uproar, made their way into the legal order, but which actually escaped the National Assembly.

It will turn out that the third item on the agenda, opened and closed in an express manner, was related to the Law on Amendments to the Law on Energy. And that act actually abolished the Moratorium, one of the shortest, but also the strictest laws of its kind in the world, which completely stopped nuclear development in Serbia, stopped the training of personnel and reduced the capacities of numerous areas that are necessary for the operation of future reactors. And also, made Serbia an extremely non-nuclear country. Some countries are pro, and some are non-nuclear, and that is, of course, perfectly fine, as long as the country does not decide to go the nuclear route, and Serbia is thinking about it more and more often.

IN A NUCLEAR NEIGHBORHOOD

As in old horror stories it was said about old and big cities, specifically Victorian London - that there is not a room in them where someone did not die - so there is no place in Europe that is more than 500 kilometers away from the nearest reactor. According to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), even after Germany shut down its reactors, today there are 168 nuclear reactors in Europe with a total installed capacity of almost 150.000 megawatts. The largest share of this nuclear capacity is, according to tradition, in France, which has 56 reactors, then in Russia, which has 37, while in third place is Ukraine with 15 reactors (five of which are located in Zaporozhye in a war environment).

Currently, a total of 10 new reactors are being built - 4 in Russia, 2 each in Ukraine and Great Britain, and 1 each in France and Slovakia. Twenty countries on the continent, as well as Serbia, do not have commercial nuclear reactors at all, nor are they currently building them. Some, like Italy and Germany, had considerable capacity, but they shut down their reactors either because their working life had expired or because of political decisions. According to IAEA data, six of Serbia's neighbors are considered to be non-nuclear countries, namely: Greece, Macedonia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Montenegro, Albania and, conditionally, Croatia.

However, despite this, Serbia is literally surrounded by nuclear reactors - there is an entire arsenal of nuclear power plants in the immediate vicinity of our country. Namely, nine reactors are currently active in Serbia's neighborhood, located in four countries: four in Hungary, two in Bulgaria, two in Romania and one in Slovenia. The total installed power of these plants is more than 5900 megawatts, which is more than the power of our domestic thermal power plants. All these reactors, except for the Slovenian one located on the Sava, were built on the Danube, and some are at a shorter distance from Belgrade than some parts of Serbia.

But are nuclear reactors really the solution? Security threat aside, nuclear reactors really don't affect climate change and could be the solution to the necessary reductions in carbon dioxide (CO₂). But does this mean that one problem will be replaced by another? In nuclear power plants, energy is obtained by releasing the tremendous energy trapped in the atomic nucleus, which takes place without the merciless burning of coal as it happens in thermal power plants. And being without any flame, a nuclear power plant emits no CO at all₂, so it does not lead to dangerous and increasingly dangerous warming of the atmosphere.

At the same time, reactors are extremely stable and reliable sources, and due to the astonishing amount of energy released in nuclear processes, they are considered almost free compared to energy obtained from coal. So, for example, most nuclear reactors use powdered uranium dioxide as fuel, compressed into 8×9 millimeter tablets. Just one such miniature tablet of uranium fuel releases as much energy as one ton of coal, 2,5 tons of firewood, three barrels of 200 liters of oil or 500 cubic meters of natural gas. Figuratively speaking, one bag of these "tablets" will cover all your energy needs for a year, from heating to travel.

THE GHOST OF CHERNOBYL

Reactors have not only been seen as a solution to the climate challenge, but also to the increasing demand for energy in the 21st century. Renewable sources have grown significantly in the energy mix, but the total power that can be obtained from solar and wind with today's technology is nowhere near enough to replace fossil fuels. There are many candidates for clean energy, from hydrogen to fusion, but there is still no commercially viable technology to completely replace coal as an energy source. Apart from nuclear sources.

In the long term, in a world that is forced to abandon fossil fuels due to climate change, and Serbia is crucially dependent on them today, it is difficult to imagine any other source that can replace coal so stably, reliably and with such power. No matter how risky, if no new technology is conquered in the meantime, it is almost certain that the energy-hungry world in the future will rely on the inexhaustible benefits of energy stored in the nucleus of the atom.

However, the obvious advantages of nuclear sources remain in the background the moment the radiation leaves the reactor. Thus, in the most dramatic incident of the nuclear age, in Chernobyl, on April 26, 1986, when there was a fire and the opening of reactor number 4 in the central plant near the Ukrainian city of Pripyat, a large amount of radiation was released into the atmosphere, which endangered a large part of Europe, poisoned the soil and damaged the health of hundreds of thousands of people.

After the incident, along with the cleaning and rehabilitation of Chernobyl, about 50 files with evidence that were used in the investigation were sent to Moscow. The files are marked as strictly confidential. For fifteen files, with documents from the nuclear power plant itself, the chroniclers of this incident write that they were so contaminated with radioactive dust that lawyers had to wear protective clothing when reading them. The fact that radiation cannot be hidden is evidenced by the fact that in the apartments, on the stairs and in the corridors of the new apartment blocks in Kyiv, where the refugees from Pripyat were settled, the levels of radiation were read hundreds of times higher than in other settlements.

Radioactive substances have permanent and destructive effects on the living world. That's why today nuclear power plants pay a lot of attention to safety, and most of the cost of a kilowatt-hour obtained from breaking the atomic nucleus is spent on increasing safety in nuclear power plants. That is why nuclear energy is not as profitable as it seems, and the construction of such capacities is not cheap at all. The cost of building a modern nuclear reactor of around 1000 MW is usually estimated at around 5 billion euros in our time, which is several times more expensive than the cost of a thermal power plant. Such a high price is a consequence of safety requirements, and a part of the funds for each reactor is set aside in a special fund for later decommissioning, in order to ensure that after the nuclear plant stops working, it does not turn into a safety problem.

For almost four decades, Serbia managed this risk in a brutal way - it completely banned the construction of reactors.

photo: photo documentation inn winch

TITO'S HERITAGE

The moratorium originally came into force in 1989. Before that, in the former Yugoslavia, nuclear physics was strongly developed, fueled by the post-war unrealizable dreams of a Yugoslav bomb, so that at the end of the XNUMXs, a very concrete civilian application would also occur. The national plan was for each of the six republics to get one nuclear reactor, for which Yugoslavia was very ready. There were three scientific centers with research reactors in the country - in Vinča, in the "Ruđer Bošković" Institute in Zagreb and the "Jožef Stefan" Institute in Ljubljana, there were also personnel from energy, mechanical engineering and construction, and nuclear engineers were trained. The first project was the construction of the Krško nuclear power plant, which was a joint venture between Croatia and Slovenia.

However, when the tender for the next reactor was already announced, an accident occurred in Chernobyl on April 26, 1986. This great tragedy, the consequences of which spread throughout Europe, led to a complete halt in the construction of nuclear reactors, and many modern authors believe that the nuclear industry has not recovered from it even to this day. True, at the beginning of the 21st century there was a so-called "nuclear renaissance", when the construction of an increasing number of reactors was planned, but the accident in Fukushima in 2011 slowed down further development, so that there have been around 450-500 operational reactors for decades.

In Serbia, Chernobyl was the reason for a whole wave of subversive social actions. In a semi-closed system such as the Yugoslav one, environmental issues in the 1980s were a valve through which many movements tried to express social criticism. The youth communist organization led a broad discussion on nuclear power plants, and one forum in the Dom omladine is famous, which turned into a kind of demonstration. Such pressure led not only to giving up, but also to banning the construction, but also the design and planning of nuclear facilities.

In the end, three years after the accident at reactor 4 in Chernobyl, a law was passed that banished future reactors from Serbia. The reactor physicists also left with them, the majors at the faculties were abolished, and over time the existing expertise also melted away - the people who did not leave, finished their careers, and thus in our time Serbia was left without nuclear personnel, which is perhaps the biggest challenge in terms of nuclear the future. Reactors are not factories for cables or the production of processed products and they cannot be imported just like that - without domestic expertise, it is not possible to build a nuclear power plant even legally and formally according to international agreements, and on the other hand, the existence of domestic experts, domestic regulators and domestic crews in reactors is the only guarantor of safety in the long run.

NUCLEAR NOISE

The abolition of the Moratorium, even without events in the parliament, was an unusual undertaking, shrouded in various layers of secrecy. This summer, the competent Ministry of Energy - despite the quite regular initiative that already existed in the parliament to abolish the Moratorium - decided to do it with "less noise" and resolved this strategic turn in nuclear policy - through transitional provisions. And that during the amendment of the law that regulates the entire energy sector, and not by a special act that would mean a true discussion on this topic. Ironically, this happened with much more noise, but also, even less visibility than the Ministry could have wished for.

Namely, although the law on amendments to the Law on Energy is not essentially dedicated to it, nor is it connected in spirit or in individual articles with the rest of this Law, and it is not explained in any way in the Explanation, in Article 132, which are its last, transitional provisions, it is said that on the day this law enters into force, the Law on the Prohibition of the Construction of Nuclear Power Plants in the Federal Republic of Yugoslavia ("Official Gazette of the FRY", number 12/95 and "Official Gazette of the RS", number 85/05) ceases to be valid - dr. law).

Apart from the abolition of the Moratorium, the now adopted legal amendments regarding nuclear energy foresee only two more concrete things - one is the way in which the program for the development of the peacetime application of nuclear energy will be created, which is designed in phases, in three steps, and the other is the competence of the ministry that should to create such a program, but also to come up with a personnel development plan, to create an information center and a number of other steps that are necessary if Serbia ever moves towards nuclear power. The referendum that would decide on the construction and the environment in which the future operators will work were not part of this Law.

It is interesting to compare the resulting law with the proposal that was put up for public discussion this summer, and which contained a number of other, "bold" steps. If those provisions were the real desire of the people in the Ministry, considering the way in which the Law was arrived at in the middle of the performance, now they are probably regretting that they gave up their excessive wishes already after the public discussion.

But this is fortunate for the citizens, because some proposals were, if not high-risk, then paradoxical. The proposal contained, also in the transitional provisions, the deletion of the article of the Criminal Code, which otherwise provides prison sanctions for anyone who illegally builds nuclear facilities. This meant that if someone illegally and illegally builds nothing less than a nuclear reactor, they will be held accountable in the same way as when they illegally build a cottage. But fortunately, that was abandoned and the law brought nothing, since it focused exclusively on the fact that its last provision abolishes the famous Moratorium.

After its abolition, Serbia is ready for a nuclear marriage, but as with any courtship, all kinds of questions are open - the most important is certainly with whom, although there is no shortage of candidates for the groom, as evidenced by the agreements on nuclear cooperation with both France and Russia. However, after the Moratorium, the question of whether Serbia, without personnel, is mature enough for this adventure is also important. The fifteen to twenty years that the process would take until the reactor is put online can be used for the development of personnel, but that is the minimum period for the development of expertise. How long do we really need to reach nuclear age? And will we ever regret the day when, in noisy, bizarre conditions, we were left without the Moratorium?