Driven by the need to diversify its energy sector and move away from cheap Russian gas, Serbia is taking steps to end its decades-long policy of banning nuclear power plants within its territory.
Several Serbian ministries have announced that the country is considering ending the 35-year Yugoslav-era ban on nuclear power plants, and a public debate has been opened on changing Belgrade’s long-term energy policy.
If successful, the Serbian government could find itself in a challenging geopolitical position regarding the use of nuclear energy in Eastern Europe, as Eastern countries seek to move away from Russian dependency and form alternative partnerships with other nations such as China, France, the United Kingdom, and the United States.
Serbian President Aleksandar Vučić is looking to create new opportunities for Serbia, given the new reality in Europe following the invasion of Ukraine. Under these new conditions, Belgrade has been compelled to reassess its cold policies toward the United States and the European Union.
“Although Serbia has not been as harsh on Russia as the European Union, it has tried to maintain a balancing act with the West,” said Stefan Vladisavljev, director of the BFPE Foundation, a Belgrade-based think tank, to Radio Free Europe. “This implies a distancing from Russia regarding major strategic projects, but concrete steps have not yet been taken.”
Before the Russian war began in February 2022, Serbia relied on cheap local labor and Russian gas to make its mining and manufacturing industries highly competitive and attractive to investors.
However, Western sanctions and market disruptions have increased the price of Russian gas, and Brussels and Washington have imposed penalties on countries that enter into new agreements with Russian companies.
This leaves Vučić in a difficult position, trying to balance the need to improve Serbia’s energy security with the new geopolitical conditions on the continent.
Serbian officials have weighed their options, holding meetings in April with representatives from the British company Rolls-Royce and the French state-owned Electricité de France (EDF). With the latter, Serbia signed a memorandum to “explore Serbia’s potential for developing a nuclear energy program.”
In June, Serbia’s Ministry of Energy said it was “laying the groundwork” to formalize an agreement with EDF.
EDF did not respond to Radio Free Europe’s requests for details on what cooperation with Serbia would entail, but China has also become involved in this issue.
The China National Nuclear Corporation (CNNC), a state-owned enterprise, could supply Serbia with Small Modular Reactors (SMRs), which are easier to construct and may better suit a small country like Serbia with more modest nuclear energy needs.
Another option is purchasing shares in the Paks 2 nuclear power plant, which is still under construction. This is a Hungarian-Russian joint project, started in 2014, located 100 kilometers southwest of Budapest, and could supply energy to southern Serbia.
The Ministry of Energy said to Radio Free Europe that it is still considering all possible collaborations.
“After changing the legislative framework, Serbia will analyze opportunities for cooperation on a regional and international level with powerful states that already have a highly developed nuclear program, such as China, France, the United States, Russia, and Japan,” the Serbian ministry’s statement reads.
A New Era for Nuclear Energy
Although Russia has lost its dominant position in oil and gas exports since the start of the war in Ukraine in 2022, it remains the largest global player in supplying nuclear fuel, holding over 40% of the global market. Russia also has a complete monopoly on the production of advanced nuclear fuel needed for the next generation of nuclear reactors.
For countries with nuclear power plants built by Russia, this dependency is even deeper. Rosatom, the Russian state nuclear energy giant, which operates 18 nuclear power plants across the EU, has built most of them in Central and Eastern Europe.
So far, Russian nuclear materials have not been included in the sanctions package imposed by Brussels, but the United States, the UK, France, and other major nuclear fuel producers have announced plans to expand their nuclear capacity and build nuclear power plants across Europe.
Against this geopolitical backdrop, Belgrade must make a decision and create long-term plans.
Currently, Serbia obtains almost 70% of its electricity from coal, but has committed to phasing it out completely by 2050. To achieve this goal, the inclusion of nuclear energy and green energy is necessary.
“It is very important where a state gets its nuclear power plant from,” Jennifer Gordon, director of the Atlantic Council’s Nuclear Energy Policy Initiative, told Radio Free Europe.
“The buyer-seller relationship can be a 100-year relationship when considering the construction of the plant, its lifespan, and then the need to decommission it.”
Countries such as the Czech Republic, Slovakia, Finland, and Bulgaria have relied on Russian nuclear fuel imports to compensate for the lack of Russian gas and oil as a result of the war, but they have also started to distance themselves from the Russian company Rosatom, excluding it from their long-term plans.
