MercoPress. South Atlantic News Agency

Argentina will press ahead with plans to develop small-scale nuclear reactors

Atucha was Latin America’s first nuclear plant

Argentina will press ahead with plans to develop a small-scale nuclear reactor over the next three years, even when last month‘s disaster in Japan prompted countries such as Germany and Brazil to reconsider projects.

The country aims to start building “in the next few months” installations to house a 25-megawatt nuclear reactor prototype known as Carem, Lucian Turina, a spokesman for the state-run project said. The prototype is scheduled to start operating by 2014, almost three decades after it was first envisioned.

Argentina’s Carem project is part of a handful of projects around the globe to construct small-scale reactors. Similar projects exist in South Korea, Russia and the US The prototype will be located in a 10-hectare complex surrounded by soybean and corn farms 150 kilometres from Buenos Aires.

The project was revived in 2006 by a presidential decree as Argentina seeks to establish itself among “the group of countries that have access to their own technology for nuclear energy,” Heriberto Boado Magan, a physicist and former army pilot who directs the Carem project, said in an interview.

“The project will cost about 350 million US dollars, including the cost of building the complex,” Boado Magan said. “Were we to replicate the Carem in the future, the cost would probably be about 200 million USD” because there wouldn’t be a need to build facilities, said Boado Magan.

The Carem project was halted in the mid-1990s amid cutbacks in government spending. The main technical difference with other projects in other parts of the world is “this is an integrated reactor, where we put everything we could into one body” Boado Magan said.

Argentina leads nuclear research in South America and has two operational nuclear plants, Atucha (1974) and Embalse (1983) plus another two in construction. Construction of Atucha 2 is scheduled to be finished late 2011. Nuclear power generates almost 7% of the country’s electricity.