A secret journey to take Serbian nuclear fuel to safety
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Inside blue, bomb-proof, fire-proof containers on the trucks are 2.5 tons of radioactive material, including 13kg of highly enriched uranium that could be used for a nuclear weapon.
This is the largest shipment of its type ever made, and will clear Serbia of all its civilian highly enriched uranium.
Just before two in the morning, the president of Serbia, Boris Tadic, sweeps in.
“We have significant security here,” he tells me. “This is extremely important.”
Two hours earlier I had been taken into the decommissioned reactor building where the Soviet-origin nuclear material had been stored.
During the Cold War, the US and Soviet Union both provided countries with reactors to carry out research. Some, like that here in Vinca, ran on highly enriched uranium which came from the USSR.
Most of Vinca’s highly enriched uranium was removed in 2002, but the remaining enriched uranium and large amounts of spent fuel were still kept here, in often poor conditions.
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