It is the 15th October 1958 and a little known nuclear disaster is about to unfold in vinca,

Yugoslav republic, modern day Serbia.

In its wake 1 would be dead and 4 would be seriously injured, although largely forgotten

now… in the aftermath.. an uncharacteristic cooperation agreement between east and west

would result in several medical and nuclear research firsts.

The desire to explore the radiological consequences of the accident resulted in French British

and Yugoslav Cooperation, the results would benefit all sides of the political spectrum

and prove the usefulness of a budding international nuclear organisation.

My name is John and this is a brief history of the vinca reactor excursion and doesemetery

experiment.

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Background a politically charged project.

Our story starts in the late 1940s and the establishment of the Vinča Institute of Nuclear

Sciences.

Yugoslavia had become a communist country in 1946… after the country had been liberated

at the end of ww2 and it abolished its monarchy in November 1945.

In its early years Yugoslavia was tentatively aligned with the USSR and it was amongst this

background that the Vinca institute was formed.

Politically the country would start to become more independent from the Soviet Union in

1948 with the Tito-Stalin split, needless to say this brought the fear of war between

the two communist countries.

Rumers were floating around that the ussr was close to its own atomic bomb and as such

Tito wanted to match his new rivals.

75 billion dinars (about $35 million at the 1953 exchange rate) was spent on building

and operating the country's fledgling nuclear industry; this constituted a significant part

of the country’s gdp.

In the early 1950s several organisations were set up at vinca in preparation to develop

an atomic weapon.

A Department for Spent Fuel Reprocessing was created in 1956; and a heavy water-moderated

zero-power critical assembly “RB reactor” was constructed in 1958.

This RB reactor was the first to be built inside Yugoslavia and strangely for the political

landscape was of a soviet design.

The whole vinca site was named the boris kedric institute.

The Reactor, an experimental design.

The reactor made use of roughly four tonnes of natural uranium in the form of 216 aluminium-clad

fuel rods.

Each rod was 2.5 cm in diameter and 210 cm long. The fuel rods, with a lattice spacing

of 12 cm, were contained in a cylindrical tank made of aluminium of 1 cm thickness.

One end of each fuel rod rested on the bottom of the tank.

The assembly used heavy water du02 as a moderator of the neutrons created during chain reaction.

Interestingly instead of control rods the system made use of the level of heavy water

in the tank to control the reactor.

2 safety rods were provided and were held out of the core by electromagnetics and if

power is cut then the rods fall into the core by gravity stopping the chain reaction thus

being fail safe.

A storage tank was provided under the reactor for excess heavy water.

The design was to also not have any form of neutron reflection as such it was mounted

on a supporting rack to ensure the tank was always at least 4m away from any potential

reflection surfaces.

As well as no reflective surfaces, the reactor had virtually no shielding which the operators

would find out later was not a good thing.

Now I need to quickly mention the reactor's name as it is considered a zero power installation.

You see, a zero power nuclear reactor is capable of sustaining a stable fission chain reaction

with no significant increase or decline in the reaction rate.

This type of installation is essential to gain practical experience of reactor operation,

but can still be deadly if the delicate balance isnt maintained.

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The accident “noone knew the danger they were in”.

It is the 15th october 1958 and an experiment is being undertaken at the Vinca reactor at

the Boris kedric institute.

6 operators are workinging inside the reactor hall on a subcritical foil counting experiment,

the workers rely on BF3 counters to monitor the reactivity of the reactor.

On the day the reactor had 3,995 kg of aluminum-clad natural uranium fuel inside its core.

Because the liquid level was normally used to control the system reactivity and the operators

wanted to obtain as much activation of the foils as possible, the heavy water level was

raised in increments, but it was intended to keep the assembly sub critical.

To do this at each level the bf3 counters needed to be closely monitored. ******

Two of the BF3 counters maxed out at maximum saturation level, but the 3rd was acting erratically,

this was disconnected and technical assistance was requested.

But what the operators didn't know was that the reactivity of the assembly was increasing

ever closer to super criticality.

After the assembly had been at this D2O level for around 5 to 8 minutes, one of the operators

started to smell ozone.

Originally it was thought that a valve may have been leaking but after investigation

it was realized that the system was supercritical at some unknown power level.

Upon realizing this the reactor was scrammed with its safety rods and the hall was evacuated.

A paper recorder based 540m away recorded an increased background gamma ray level for

around 10 minutes.

The heavy water level was at 183 cm and the reactor was in an uncontrolled state for 433

seconds.

During the excursion The total energy release was about 80 million joules (about 2 kg of

TNT equivalent).

A terrific amount of energy to be exposed to especially in an unshielded assembly, definitely

somewhere you would not want to be standing next to.

6 personnel had received varying doses of radiation…initially they received first

aid onsite before being sent to paris for specialist care.

The hospital they were transferred to was the world famous Curie Foundation and there

they were placed under the care of Dr. H. Jammet.

Of the 6 exposed individuals 1 was to be treated conventionally with blood transfusion this

was due to his exposure being significantly lower than the others.

But it was quickly realized that the others would require some drastic treatment, as they

had received in some cases close to and well over a lethal dose.

blood cells falling sharply.

At the time the concept of bone marrow transplants was in its early stages, great strides had

been made in the field in the US but in the late 1950s it was still very much an experimental

science.

The bone marrow grafts were performed by Georges Mathe, an oncologist, and made use of donors

That were all French: Marcel Pabion, Albert Biron, Raymond Castanier and Odette Dragh.

The fifth donor was Léon Schwartzenberg, a member of Mathé's team.

The grafts and subsequent treatment helped further the concept of bone marrow grafts,

immunotherapy and how it could be used to treat cancer.

28 days post exposure treatment began, but for one of the men this was too late, they

had received too high of a dose and the treatment didn't help reverse his outcome and sadly

passed away.

However for the other 4 the grafts worked and they gradually made a recovery, reportedly

still being alive in 1980 19 years post exposure with at least 1 of the men becoming a father

to a healthy child.

You see what was interesting with the transplants, was that host versus graft disease was not

observed in the patients who received the bone marrow.

One theory that was posed was that the high radiation exposure had actually prevented

the creation of antibodies and in a happy side effect facilitated the incorporation

of the grafted marrow.

It was estimated that the doses of each man who was ages between 23-26 had revived in

descending order 433, 422, 415, 410, 320, and 205 rem respectively.

For reference 500 rem without any treatment is fatal and between 400-1000 can result in

early death.

It really depends on how much was received where in the body and health of the victim

prior to exposure, as will as a multitude of other factors.

Now the doses of the patients was very inaccurate due to the fact that the reactor was supercritical

for a rather long period of time, and studies into Acute radiation sickness were not very

abundant at the time.

But the reactor now powered down offered an opportunity for the scientific community in

which a study could be undertaken to further understand dose effects on humans.

The vinca dosimetric study

The situation presented to the international community and Yugoslav nuclear officials was

that if the exact doses could be ascertained through an experiment then it could be linked

up to the treatment and ars symptoms of the patients.

Post Stalin Tito split Yugoslavia was more open to collaboration with the west and in

February 1960 an agreement was signed between the federal nuclear energy committee and the

iaea where the reactor would be reactivated and prepared for an experiment.

Part of the reactivation required around 6.5 tonnes of heavy water, as the original stock

had been reused in Vincas other reactors, after negotiations with a number of IAEA member

states the United Kingdom offered the required material for free for the length of the experiment.

The French Commissariat a l 'Energie Atomique offered to make modifications to the reactor

for free as well.

The modifications consisted of detector and more comprehensive control equipment which

allowed the reactor to be placed into different reactivity states more effectively.

More obvious alterations were a wall of sandbags and concrete between the reactor hall and

control room to protect the operators from any fast neutrons.

For the experiment the reactor was to be operated in two power ranges, low and high.

This was to take place at the end of April 1960.

The low power test ran the reactor at 5w and used multiple positions to measure fast neutrons

and gamma doses.

But the high power tests were where things really got interesting as this would involve

these rather creepily characters named phantoms.

They were designed to mimic a human body to allow greater dosimetric accuracy.

The phantoms were filled with an aqueous solution of NaCl at a concentration of 15.7 mg Na per

gram of solution.

After each experiment the sodium activation was measured.

The high power experiment ran at two power levels 1kw and 5kw.

For each run the phantoms were placed in different positions with the lower being closer to the

reactor and the higher being further away.

After the experiments the iaea released its report in 1962 and its well worth reading

The study helped create a greater understanding of potential dose a person can receive in

certain circumstances.

This also Inturn helped in the understanding of the types of shielding needed to protect

staff from fast neutrons and gamma rays.

However the experiment wasn’t the magic catch all bullet but rather another tool available

to nuclear industry.

Even in the iaea reports own concluding remarks this is hinted upon.

“It can (thus) not be expected that data for any one accident can solve all the basic

questions at once or even any of them completely.”

What the experiment did show was the benefits of cross border cooperation when it comes

to radiological investigation.

The disaster and subsequent experiment showed that the young iaea which was founded in 1957

could work as a concept for interstate nuclear industry Cooperation.

After all, it did successfully broker an agreement where an experiment in a Soviet designed reactor

based in Yugoslavia modified by the french and filled with British heavy water could

be used for the greater good of dosimetry discovery.

Now where would you rate this disaster on my scale? I’m going to give it a 3 on my

disaster scale due to the death of a young operator and the horrible pain the other must

have gone through, but an 8 on my legacy scale because of international cooperation, valuable

information gained from the experiement and the successful use of bone marrow grafts.

This video is a Plainly Difficult production. All videos on the channel are creative commons

Attribution-ShareAlike. Plainly difficult videos are produced by me

John, in a sunny Southeastern corner of london, uk.

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thank you for watching!.

https://www.johnstonsarchive.net/nuclear/radevents/1958YUG1.html

https://nonproliferation.org/titos-nuclear-legacy/

https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/magazines/bulletin/bull2-2/02205800405.pdf

https://inis.iaea.org/collection/NCLCollectionStore/_Public/38/085/38085294.pdf?r=1

https://www.osti.gov/etdeweb/servlets/purl/20918988

https://www.nrc.gov/docs/ML0037/ML003731912.pdf page 96

https://www.vin.bg.ac.rs/en/about-institute/history-of-the-institute