Argentina told the International Atomic Energy Agency’s 70th General Conference in Vienna on September 14 that its four-decade-old nuclear engineering industry is an underused source of export revenue, and that the government wants to scale it up.
Federico Ramos Napoli, Argentina’s 32-year-old Secretary of Nuclear Affairs, framed the strategy around exports of technology and services rather than new domestic power generation. The plan calls for expanding sales of research reactors, the specialized facilities used for scientific research and for producing medical isotopes such as molybdenum-99, a key ingredient in diagnostic cancer and cardiac scans worldwide.
The pitch rests on a track record most Argentines are only vaguely aware of. INVAP, the state-owned engineering firm based in Bariloche, has spent roughly forty years designing and building research reactors for other countries, including Australia’s OPAL reactor, along with projects in Egypt, Algeria, Peru and the Netherlands. Ramos Napoli’s argument was that this expertise, built up quietly over decades, could earn far more foreign currency if Argentina treated it as a deliberate export strategy rather than a series of one-off contracts.
To do that, the government wants to restructure how the sector is financed. Ramos Napoli described plans for a mixed-capital company that would combine Argentina’s National Atomic Energy Commission, CNEA, with private investors, following a model used by France’s state-linked nuclear group EDF and Framatome. Under the proposal, CNEA would retain a golden share with veto power over strategic decisions while private capital, on the order of $200 million, would fund the commercial buildout needed to compete for international contracts.
The strategy is separate from Argentina’s domestic nuclear buildout. The RA-10, a multipurpose research reactor under construction outside Buenos Aires, has gone from roughly half-built to about 96% complete in under two years, after a timeline that had slipped from an original 2019 target to as late as 2029 or 2030 under the previous administration. Once operational, it is expected to raise Argentina’s output of molybdenum-99 sixfold, from 400-500 curies a week to roughly 3,000, along with other medical isotopes such as lutetium-177 and iridium-192. Officials in Vienna framed the RA-10 as a domestic capability project, distinct from the commercial exports built around INVAP’s reactor-building business.
Global interest in nuclear technology has picked up as data centers drive new electricity demand and countries pursue decarbonization targets. That creates a market for the small-scale, specialized infrastructure Argentina has built its expertise around, including small modular reactors that officials in Vienna pitched as solutions for remote or hard-to-finance power needs. Argentina’s limited access to international credit markets makes export revenue from a sector where it already has technical credibility more attractive.
The obstacles are real. Nuclear technology exports require years-long international safeguards agreements and regulatory approvals before a single reactor can be shipped, and Argentina’s constrained credit profile makes financing new export contracts harder than for a country with easier market access. Nothing announced in Vienna converts into signed contracts in the near term.