Although there is fear for a possible adjustment, the two most modern reactors on the continent are under construction. The National Atomic Energy Commission is today one of the few State policies in the country, with almost seven decades at the head of the national science and technology system.
“The CNEA has a particularity that does not have any other science and technology body: it goes from basic science, with specialists in black holes and neutron stars, to the development of the nuclear reactors of the future, such as the CAREM project, made in its entirety in the country, ” explained the vice-president of the CNEA, Alberto Lamagna.
Among the lines of work of the CNEA, the generation of large-scale nuclear power stands out; the production of nuclear fuels; environmental safety and rigorous management of radioactive materials; the application of nuclear technology in the national health system; innovation and technology transfer for the productive framework; the promotion of the formation of highly specialized human resources, and the development of basic science and technology in nuclear matters.
The development of each of these areas was derived, over the years, in state and mixed companies that feed on their research. Thus, for example, of the production of nuclear fuel for power plants, Conuar (Nuclear Fuels) was created, which is a mixed company, where CNEA contributes the technological leg – engineering in fuels – and the business organization puts it the private one
The most emblematic case is INVAP, which was born in 1976 from the Applied Research Department of CNEA, and today develops in its laboratories the entire Argentine satellite industry and produces reactors like those that were exported to Algeria, Egypt and Australia. These are companies, some of them state-owned and others mixed, that emerged from CNEA as the mother ship of this entire nuclear system. Everything is born in a laboratory: it goes from basic to applied science, to engineering and ends in a prototype or a process.
The CNEA is the scientific and technological partner, a research and development laboratory that is deriving in many other areas of work, such as Nuclear Medicine, where today we lead with the highest technology at the global level of diagnosis and treatment of oncological and degenerative diseases.
