Today we publish on Zirconio an interactive map of uranium in Argentina. It is a tool that brings together, in a single place, the price of the mineral, the projects, the resources and the country’s foreign trade, and lets you navigate all of it from one screen. You can open it at https://uranio.zirconio.ar/
It shows how much uranium Argentina holds, where it is, what stage each project has reached and how the trade in the mineral moves. It is built for professionals, companies and investors who need consolidated data to make decisions.
Argentina operates three nuclear power plants and has not produced uranium since 1997. All the mineral its reactors consume is imported. Even so, the country holds 33,650 tonnes of uranium in identified resources and 21 projects at various stages of exploration and development. To put that in perspective, between 1952 and 1997 Argentina produced just 2,600 tonnes, so what today counts as a known resource far exceeds everything the country extracted across four decades of activity.
The problem we identified is the dispersion of all the information tied to uranium. The data exists, but it sits scattered across the databases of the International Atomic Energy Agency, company filings and foreign-trade records. Each source tells one part and none assembles the full picture.
The map integrates those sources into five layers, and in this article we go through them one by one.
The resources
The first layer consolidates the country’s identified resources, those 33,650 tonnes spread across the different deposits. It is the figure usually cited loose and without context, and here it appears alongside the projects that back it and the historical production that gives it scale.
Price and its trend
The second layer tracks the international price of uranium with a monthly series that starts in 1990 and runs to today, more than three decades of quotes in a single chart. That path reveals the mineral’s cycles, from the peak in the mid-2000s to the collapse that followed the Fukushima accident in 2011 and the recovery of recent years. It is the price that orders everything else, because whether an exploration project makes economic sense or stays on paper depends on it.
The projects
The third layer places the country’s 21 uranium projects on the map, spread across six provinces, Río Negro, Chubut, Neuquén, Mendoza, Salta and Santa Cruz. Each one is classified by its stage of progress, from initial prospecting to feasibility, passing through exploration and preliminary economic assessment. Of the 21, only two reached the feasibility stage, Sierra Pintada in Mendoza and Don Otto in Salta. The rest are spread across the earlier phases, which gives a sense of how much ground remains before Argentina produces its own uranium again.
Foreign trade
The fourth layer reconstructs Argentina’s uranium trade since 1994 and lays the imbalance bare. The country imported some 538 million dollars’ worth and exported barely 11.8 million. It is the concrete flip side of not producing uranium since 1997, every tonne that enters the Argentine cycle arrives from abroad.
The fuel cycle
The fifth layer is a guided tour through the twelve stages of the nuclear fuel cycle, from the geological formation of the mineral to waste management, with the Argentine context at each step. It helps you understand where each project, each tonne of resource and each import fits within the full chain that runs from deposit to reactor.
The first piece of a nuclear-industry atlas
Everything is navigable. You can filter by project status, move through the price series, select the trade flows and step through the cycle one stage at a time. This is the first piece of an open atlas of Argentina’s nuclear industry that we are building.
You can open the full map at uranio.zirconio.ar