Nuclear Reactors made in Patagonia Argentine firm Invap, leader in the nuclear technology field in Latin America, makes its mark in the aerospace sector

FRANCISCA RISATTI

Buenos Aires 9 OCT 2016

In 2000, when Australia had to decide who would build its only nuclear research reactor to replace a British model, an Argentine public-funded company, which at the time had 350 employees, fought off competition from industry heavyweights such as the French firm Technicatome (‘Areva’ since 2006) and the German firm Siemens. Invap built the reactor at its Patagonian hub in San Carlos de Bariloche. The achievement, marking the firm’s first export to a developed country, set it firmly among the big league for service providers of nuclear technology for peaceful means. Today, on the verge of celebrating its 40th anniversary, and following a move towards greater diversification, the company has proved to be the only Latin American country capable of designing, building and operating its own satellites.

The Argentine Ambassador to the International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA), as well as its former assistant director-general, Rafael Grossi, has said that the company occupies a “leading position” in the research reactor industry. “Invap’s great asset is its ability to produce what the client needs, rather than selling them something they already make. Invap sees the problem and the technological requirements and then considers and designs the solution”, Grossi stated.

“When we won the bid for the Australia project, the company was turning over around 30 million dollars per year. Over the last 15 years, this figure has increased six-fold and today we have a turnover of around 200 million dollars”, said Héctor Otheguy, the company’s CEO, at Invap’s headquarters in . 1,500 kilometres away, at the Bariloche site, where 80% of the staff work, Invap’s second-in-command, Vicente Campenni, explains that all of Invap’s revenue comes from the contracts that they win: “We are a public company, but we have never had a government budget or subsidies”. This financial autonomy may help explain Invap’s ability to keep itself running as an efficient and competitive public company amidst all the toings and froings of Argentine politics, perhaps as exceptional as its location in Patagonia. The employees of this technological company owe the extraordinary views they enjoy from their desks to Ronald Richter, an Austrian scientist who, after the Second World War, was lured to the country in the late 1940s by the Perón government, which invited German scientists and technicians, including some Nazis, to help boost the country’s industry. Richter convinced Perón to finance a project to carry out controlled nuclear fusion, something that no laboratory in the world had succeeded in doing at that time. Arguing that his work demanded the greatest isolation possible and extreme security measures, the scientist managed to get his experimentation facilities built on Huemul Island in Nahuel Huapi Lake, just off Bariloche.

Born amidst farce

Shortly after this, authorities visiting the island began to notice that Richter was acting strangely and decided to send a board of scientists to investigate what was going on there. The report that Perón received in 1952 confirmed that the progress the Austrian alleged to have made was a sham. The project was cancelled and today the island is a nature reserve. However, Argentina’s National Atomic Energy Commission (CNEA), that was set up to provide a legal framework for the initiative, already had one of its main bases in Bariloche, and it was from here that not only a ground-breaking Latin American nuclear development would emerge, but also a physics research institute that was to prove key in the emergence of Invap: el Balseiro, thus named from 1962 in tribute to one of the scientists who exposed Richter and who was the institute’s first director (José Antonio Balseiro).

“The company was set up in the 70s by a group of graduates from the Balseiro”, Campenni says. In its early years, Applied Investigations (‘Invap’ being the abbreviation of this in Spanish) was a CNEA programme designed to develop technology that would drive progress. “Very quickly they came to realise that the very dynamic of productive technological projects was not achievable within a state organisation, and so the concept of Invap as a company emerged. The firm is not dependent on a government budget, but politics is crucial in the contracts it wins. “The first research reactor that the company built, the RA6, could have been imported, but a political decision was taken to produce it domestically”, Campenni explains.

The successful construction of that reactor, completed in 1982, helped the company make the leap overseas: back then, Algeria was looking to build a very similar reactor and in 1985 it signed an agreement with Argentina for Invap to execute the plan. “With the RA6 it had been proven that we had the capability to do it”, Otheguy explains. There was also a curious bit of alphabetical happenstance at play; in International Atomic Energy Agency meetings, Argentina and Algeria would sit next to each other. “There was a very fluid conversation between us, so we were in tune with their needs”, Otheguy recalls.

Following on from this came another tender to build a multi-purpose reactor in Egypt, to replace an old Solviet design. “The crowning achievement was Australia, which was a very large tender”, Campenni says. The signing of this contract in 2000 came precisely when they needed it most. “In the 90s, (Carlos) Menem’s (Peronist) government failed to encourage national technological development. The company shrank and shed many staff”, Campenni says. The policy of distancing ourselves from the US at that time was detrimental to the company, seeing it lose contracts to export nuclear technology to at Washington’s request. But our largest cooperation project with NASA, meanwhile, boosted the development of Invap’s aerospace capacity. One of the responses to the crisis was then to diversify.

“Having designed, built and sent six satellites into orbit, Invap is the only Latin American company today with the capacity to carry out complete satellite projects, from the design phase through to the satellite’s orbiting and running phase, with the exception of the launch”, Campenni says, before a glass screen that separates him from the imposing room where the Saocom is built. The Saocom is a three tonne satellite that will be linked up to an Italian-Argentine natural disaster warning and detection system that is also capable of measuring ground humidity over large areas – a very useful feature in an agricultural country like Argentina. “We have also taken the step from nuclear to aerospace because we know that with each project a further know-how is added to the company, enabling us to work in new fields. Thus, a few years ago we were able to make the leap from aerospace to security and defence projects. The radiofrequency knowledge we picked up in the course of building a satellite paved the way for us to design and produce radars”, Campenni explains.

KEY FIGURES

1,420 employees work for the firm, 80% of whom are technicians.

The annual turnover totals around 200 million dollars and all profits are re-invested back into the company.

Abroad it has four branches (in Australia, Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Algeria) and three subsidiaries (in the USA, Brazil and Venezuela).

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