Building Public Trust Before Building Reactors

Key findings

▪      Since lifting its 35-year nuclear moratorium in November 2024, Serbia has focused almost entirely on technical questions: vendor, reactor type, financing and siting.

▪      Serbia’s 2019 safety law and its regulator SRBATOM were built for medical and industrial uses of radiation, not for a power programme. They lack a framework for public information and participation.

▪      France’s 2006 TSN Law shows that public confidence is built through institutions: an independent regulator, mandatory disclosure and a standing transparency forum.

▪      The Vinča Institute, with over 500 researchers and 75 years of history, is the natural scientific cornerstone of a Serbian transparency framework.

▪      Recommendation: adopt a Nuclear Transparency and Public Confidence Act before Serbia selects a reactor vendor.

1. Serbia’s nuclear return needs institutional foundations

In November 2024, Serbia’s National Assembly lifted the moratorium on nuclear power plants in place since 1989, adopted in Yugoslavia three years after Chernobyl. Serbia is now, formally, a country preparing to enter civil nuclear energy.

The machinery has moved quickly. The law envisages a Directorate for Nuclear Energy Development and a peaceful nuclear programme prepared with the IAEA in three phases. The government has signed a memorandum with France’s EDF, concluded an intergovernmental agreement during President Macron’s 2024 visit, and awarded EDF and Egis the first preliminary study. In July 2024, five ministries and some twenty institutions, Vinča among them, signed a memorandum to build a domestic knowledge base. Planners speak of roughly 1,200 MW of new capacity to displace coal, which still supplies close to 70% of Serbia’s electricity.

This momentum is channelled almost entirely toward technical questions: which vendor, which reactor class, what financing, which site. These are the right questions, but not the first ones. No country has succeeded in nuclear energy on engineering alone. France, the United States, South Korea and the UAE each built regulators, scientific institutions and public-information systems that allowed their reactors to be financed, licensed and trusted for decades. Engineering decides whether a plant can be built. Institutions decide whether a country can sustain a programme.

2. Why transparency is now a strategic requirement

Fukushima taught the nuclear community that the most damaging failures are informational as well as technical. Confused and slow official communication eroded public confidence almost as much as the accident itself. Transparency is no longer a courtesy; it is a precondition for operating nuclear infrastructure.

Two trends sharpen this. Trust in institutions has declined across Europe, and nuclear programmes are especially exposed because they ask citizens to accept low-probability, high-consequence risk on expert assurance. Social media can turn one unexplained monitoring reading or delayed disclosure into a national controversy within hours. Without a credible and fast source of information, a programme is vulnerable.

For Serbia, the stakes are concrete. A nuclear programme is a sixty-year commitment, and officials have estimated large reactors at €11–13 billion. In a polarised climate, infrastructure without a reliable information backbone becomes hostage to whoever tells the most compelling story. Distrust can delay, raise the cost of, or reverse such projects. Transparency therefore belongs alongside energy security and national resilience.

3. France’s TSN Law as a model

France, Serbia’s principal nuclear partner, learned early that public confidence must be built deliberately through law. The 2006 Act on Transparency and Security in the Nuclear Field (TSN) defined nuclear safety, public information and transparency in statute; set out principles including precaution, polluter-pays and the right to information; and clarified the roles of state, operator and regulator. It created the Autorité de sûreté nucléaire (ASN) as an independent regulator, and a High Committee for Transparency where operators, regulators, unions and civil society examine the same data in the open.

The law translated these principles into visible obligations: published inspection findings, accessible radiation data and structured emergency communication. When concealed quality records surfaced on steel forgings from the Le Creusot plant, it was the independent regulator that brought the problem to light and forced corrective action. Transparency is part of what keeps the system safe.

France has kept strengthening this architecture. Facing a nuclear revival, it merged ASN and its technical arm IRSN into ASNR in January 2025. The lesson for Serbia is twofold: confidence comes from institutions, not press releases, and those institutions must be reinforced precisely as the stakes rise.

Table 1. France’s transparency architecture and Serbia’s gap

Source: Pupin Initiative compilation based on ASN, IAEA and SRBATOM materials cited in this analysis.

4. Why Serbia needs its own Nuclear Transparency Act

Serbia is not starting from scratch. It has an independent regulator, SRBATOM, created by the 2019 Law on Radiation and Nuclear Safety and Security, and an expanding radiation-monitoring network. But that framework was designed for medical and industrial uses of radiation and legacy materials, not for a power programme. It is a safety and licensing law, without an architecture for public information, participation and independent communication. Serbia needs a dedicated Law on Nuclear Transparency and Public Confidence alongside it, for four reasons.

Public trust. The law would make openness a permanent legal default rather than a favour granted by whoever holds office. Citizens need not love nuclear energy to accept it; they need to believe they will be told the truth, in time, by someone competent.

Investor confidence. Western financiers price political risk as carefully as engineering risk. A programme anchored in predictable governance is a safer asset than one exposed to a single information crisis.

International credibility. The IAEA’s Milestones Approach treats stakeholder involvement as a core infrastructure issue. A transparency act would show alignment with IAEA expectations, the EU and Euratom acquis Serbia must adopt, and OECD Nuclear Energy Agency standards.

Strategic partnerships. Western partners increasingly judge governance alongside technology. Strong transparency institutions strengthen Serbia’s hand with France (EDF, CEA, ASNR), the United States (DOE, NNSA and vendors such as Westinghouse) and the IAEA. U.S. State Department officials have already visited SRBATOM. Governance is now part of the price of entry into the Western nuclear ecosystem.

5. Vinča: Serbia’s most valuable nuclear institution

Every durable nuclear programme rests on a trusted scientific institution linking science, government, industry and society: France has the CEA, the United States its national laboratories. Serbia has had its candidate since 1948. The Vinča Institute of Nuclear Sciences, part of the University of Belgrade, employs over 500 researchers across physics, chemistry, biology, power engineering, radiation protection and radiopharmaceuticals. It has already set up an internal Commission for Nuclear Energy and signed the 2024 memorandum. It should now be designated, in law and in practice, as Serbia’s national centre for four functions:

▪  Scientific communication: explaining nuclear energy in plain language and countering misinformation with evidence, as a voice that is neither the government’s nor a vendor’s.

▪  Independent expertise: technical assessments, input into licensing and siting, and support to the National Assembly so that MPs do not rely only on the executive or bidders.

▪  Education: rebuilding the expertise drained by the 1989 moratorium by training engineers, operators, regulators and emergency staff with Serbian universities.

▪  International cooperation: serving as the hub for partnerships with the IAEA, CEA, DOE, NNSA and European laboratories.

Vinča’s irreplaceable asset is scientific credibility built over 75 years, and its own history embodies the transparency principle. A 1958 criticality accident whose reporting was suppressed at the time shows what secrecy costs. The same institute later hosted the internationally coordinated repatriation of its highly enriched uranium and spent fuel, completed in 2010 with U.S., Russian, IAEA and European cooperation. Its unresolved legacy-waste challenge remains a standing transparency test. The institute that once learned the price of opacity is well placed to guarantee its opposite.

6. What the law should include

A Serbian Nuclear Transparency and Public Confidence Act should be concrete enough to change behaviour. Its core provisions:

Table 2. Core provisions of a Serbian Nuclear Transparency Act

7. Policy recommendations

1.     Legislate before you select. Adopt the Act before choosing a reactor vendor, so that it shapes procurement, contracts and public debate rather than being bolted on afterwards.

2.     Designate Vinča formally as Serbia’s National Centre for Nuclear Scientific Communication, with a defined mandate and budget.

3.     Create a permanent Nuclear Transparency Council, modelled on France’s High Committee, bringing together Vinča, SRBATOM, universities, civil society and the Ministry of Mining and Energy.

4.     Let scientists lead the public conversation through a national education campaign fronted by Vinča’s researchers, not politicians.

5.     Build transparency into every agreement with France, the United States, the IAEA and any vendor, so that openness travels with the technology.

Conclusion

Serbia’s first reactor may define its electricity mix for sixty years. The institutions it builds today may define public confidence for a century, and confidence, not concrete, is the scarcer resource. France and the United States did not earn durable nuclear programmes through engineering alone; they built the regulators, laboratories and information frameworks that made those programmes legitimate. Serbia should begin where they did, with a Nuclear Transparency Act and the Vinča Institute as its scientific cornerstone. Reactors can be purchased. Public trust has to be built, and Serbia should start before the first foundation is poured.