At the end of March, Serbia signed an agreement with the Russian state company Rosatom on a joint venture, which will start building the Center for Nuclear Science by the end of the year, announced Minister of Innovation Nenad Popovic at the World Exhibition in Dubai.
He believes that the solution to the energy crisis in the world is the production of nuclear energy, and that Serbia will discuss this not only with the Russians but also with the Chinese, Koreans and Americans.
The agreement on the opening of the joint Center for Nuclear Science was signed in 2019, when the President of the Russian Federation, Vladimir Putin, was in Belgrade. A location is now being chosen with Russian experts, RTS reports. It is known that it will be somewhere on the Danube, that it will be built for four years, and it is estimated that the Center will contribute a lot to the education system of Serbia.
“The project will be realized in several phases. For a start, it will focus on medical technologies. We will create a good scientific base for education and non-energy application of nuclear energy in Serbia and other countries in the region and beyond,” said Evgenij Pakermanov from Rosatom.
Professor of the Faculty of Natural Sciences and Mathematics in Novi Sad, Dr. Miodrag Krmor, pointed out that this is a center that will be able to produce isotopes for medicine and agriculture.
“It is planned to produce semiconductors in that center. There will be other industrial examples concerning most of the material. In principle, it would pull a few branches behind it,” stated Dr. Krmor.
Although the construction of nuclear power plants was banned by law in Serbia after the Chernobyl accident 30 years ago, they have been talked about more and more in recent months. The President of Serbia, Aleksandar Vučić, also confirmed that they are a topic in the talks with Rosatom after the meeting with Putin in Sochi.
“We are ready to offer our Serbian partners the best solutions and technologies, but it must be a national decision, a decision of the Serbian state and people. And if it is adopted, we are ready to support it,” Pakermanov emphasized.
Minister without portfolio in charge of innovation and technological development, Nenad Popovic, said that there were initial ideas regarding the construction of a nuclear power plant in Serbia.
“Serbia must do what all the most modern economies in the world are doing. All those who want to improve their economy must provide cheap and clean electricity to their companies. The only way for Serbia to do that in the future is to build a nuclear power plant, and I am sure that in the future, in the next year, we will talk to many partners from the European Union, Korea, America and Russia,” Popovic said.
According to experts, at the exhibition of world achievements in Dubai, in order to move from talks to concrete agreements, we should first change the law and lift the moratorium, resolve raw materials and waste, educate experts, change the public’s negative attitude towards nuclear energy. That is why, they believe, nuclear power plants are at least a decade away from Serbia.
By the way, nuclear power plants produce a quarter of the electricity in the EU. Although a moratorium is in force to ban their construction in Serbia, the authorities are announcing a public debate on the construction of modern, so-called “modular nuclear power plants” or the purchase of shares in a nuclear power plant in the surrounding countries, Biznis reports.
