Argentina was a leading actor in the nuclear sector throughout much of the twentieth century. It commissioned the first research reactor in the Southern Hemisphere, RA-1, in 1958, and the first nuclear power plant in Latin America, Atucha I, in 1974. This trajectory was built on a centralized, technocratic model with strong state leadership.

That trajectory, however, did not unfold linearly. With the return of democracy in 1983, the sector entered a period of institutional weakening, restructuring, and growing political and social conflict. The major projects inherited from the final stage of military rule lost momentum and were never completed, while local resistance began to emerge against new nuclear initiatives and uranium mining projects. Later, during the 1990s, the State reforms reshaped the sector’s organization.

Those 1990s reforms dismantled the institutional architecture of the sector, until then centralized in the National Atomic Energy Commission (CNEA). Under the new arrangement, even though the National Nuclear Activity Law assigned the Commission the responsibility of advising the Executive Branch on nuclear policy, in practice it lost influence in both policy design and implementation. As a result, the Argentine nuclear model became a more fragmented institutional structure, with a greater number of actors operating with their own autonomy and interests, yet without integrated planning to articulate them effectively.

Moreover, without a long-term strategy to channel inherited technological capabilities and offer concrete incentives for provinces to participate in nuclear development, each jurisdiction ended up responding to its own local circumstances.

As one of the outcomes of this process, every Argentine province today restricts or prohibits some stage of nuclear activity through legislation or constitutional provisions. In practice, this regulatory fragmentation severely conditions the possibility of building new nuclear power plants and developing the country’s uranium resources.

The legal framework that enables the blockages

Nuclear policy is, by institutional design, a competence of the national State, historically exercised through Federal bodies such as the Commission and sustained by international commitments. The provincial fragmentation that conditions its development today, however, also has constitutional grounding.

The 1994 constitutional reform introduced Article 124, which recognizes the provinces’ original dominion over the natural resources within their territory. Three years later, the National Nuclear Activity Law (No. 24,804) established in Article 11 that the installation of nuclear power plants requires, in addition to the approval of the Nuclear Regulatory Authority (ARN), the consent of the province where the plant is to be sited.

This legal configuration reinforced the capacity of provinces to condition or block central aspects of national nuclear policy. In practice, even when the national State treats nuclear activity as strategic, a province can halt projects linked both to uranium mining and to the siting of plants. These constitutional provisions are further compounded by a set of provincial laws and rules restricting or prohibiting various stages of nuclear activity or the fuel cycle.

The result is the coexistence of a State that promotes nuclear energy and a provincial regulatory landscape that limits its territorial deployment. Argentina thus faces a crossroads that is both legal, owing to the overlap of competences between the Nation and the provinces, and political, owing to the State’s inability to build the institutional consensus needed to sustain a nuclear policy of national reach.

Origins of the political-legal crossroads

Beyond the institutional reforms of the 1990s, this phenomenon can be traced back further. In 1984, the municipality of El Bolsón, in Río Negro, declared itself a “Non-Nuclear Zone,” in one of the earliest cases of political-territorial opposition to nuclear activity in the country. Shortly after, in 1986, the Commission’s announcement that it would site a high-level radioactive waste repository in Gastre (Chubut Province) triggered the first antinuclear mobilization of national scope. The resistance, articulated among local communities, academic sectors, and environmental organizations, succeeded in halting the project and consolidated an antinuclear discourse with strong social legitimacy.

These milestones set the precedent for the rest of the country’s provinces with respect to antinuclear legislation. So much so that, today, every province restricts in some form the transport and storage of radioactive waste, the siting of nuclear power plants, and/or uranium mining activity.

In practice, provinces frequently invoke the precautionary principle and environmental protection, without the corresponding technical assessments or analyses, to justify restrictions that range from the symbolic to the effective blocking of strategic projects.

Río Negro: the paradigmatic case

Few cases illustrate this crossroads better than Río Negro. That province was the birthplace and home of the Bariloche Atomic Center, the Balseiro Institute, and the company INVAP, three Argentine institutions of international standing in nuclear science and technology. For decades, Río Negro stood alongside Buenos Aires as one of the provinces most identified with nuclear development. Yet in 2017, the Río Negro legislature enacted Law 5,227, which prohibited the installation of nuclear power plants within its territory.

The paradox was that while INVAP exported nuclear technology around the world, the Balseiro Institute trained nuclear engineers, and the Bariloche Atomic Center produced frontier research, a group of legislators was passing a law forbidding the very possibility of generating nuclear power within their territory.

The parliamentary debate that led to that law, whose transcripts are public¹, makes it possible to reconstruct the arguments behind the decision to ban nuclear power generation in the province. How did this come about?

In 2015, Argentina signed an agreement with China to build two new nuclear power plants. One of them was planned for the Atlantic coast of Río Negro, near the town of Sierra Grande. In May 2017, under the Mauricio Macri administration, the national government ratified the agreement. The governor of Río Negro at the time, Alberto Weretilneck, publicly endorsed the agenda.

In August of that year, however, the Open, Simultaneous, and Mandatory Primary elections (PASO) took place, with a result that hurt Weretilneck’s candidate². A month later, the provincial legislature passed the law prohibiting the installation of nuclear power plants in the province.

To defend the new law and justify his sharp change of position, the governor invoked the absence of “social license” for the project. Yet no formal consultation process had been conducted to gauge the views of Río Negro residents. This suggests that the parliamentary debate preceding the law was shaped more by electoral circumstances than by a technical or strategic assessment of the project. Soon after, the national government postponed the investment, and the project was ultimately cancelled in 2019.

In two years, Argentina went from announcing the expansion of its nuclear fleet to a provincial veto that added Río Negro to the list of antinuclear provinces. The episode reflected a recurring pattern in Argentine politics, in which long-term planning is subordinated to electoral cycles.

How does a hub of knowledge and technology, instead of leading the deployment of the nuclear sector, end up rejecting what it does best?

The Río Negro paradox captures the heart of this crossroads and exposes the fragility of the coordination between the Nation and the provinces on a strategic activity such as nuclear energy. This fragility not only undermines projects in the present but also jeopardizes the country’s ability to take advantage of the renewed global momentum behind nuclear energy.

The path forward

The blockage of nuclear energy in Argentina does not stem from widespread public rejection. The three operating plants (Atucha I, Atucha II, and Embalse) have run for decades without social conflict, and the Bariloche nuclear hub has coexisted with its community since the Atomic Center was established in the 1950s. The problem lies elsewhere: in the absence of consensus across levels of government, institutional uncoordination, ineffective project execution, and the lack of incentives for the provinces, which today are central actors in the blockage.

The crossroads is, in essence, a political problem. Provincial laws and constitutions can be amended, but only if the agreements to enable such change exist. Resolving it depends less on legislative reform than on the construction of long-term consensus. Over the past four decades, the national State has failed to consolidate a scheme of agreements, benefits, and incentives capable of incorporating the provinces as effective partners in nuclear development.

There is no clear roadmap that defines objectives and priorities or brings order to the ecosystem of bodies and companies that make up the sector.

Moving forward and preventing these conflicts from being perpetuated requires:

• A specialized executive unit dedicated to planning, coordinating, and monitoring national nuclear policy, capable of organizing the institutional ecosystem without overlapping functions with existing bodies.
• A compensation law that guarantees direct and sustained economic benefits to the provinces that host nuclear facilities, as is the case in the United States and Canada.
• A program to reclaim territories with high strategic potential for nuclear activity (Río Negro, Chubut, Santa Cruz, Buenos Aires, Córdoba, Mendoza) through an incentive system that leads provinces not only to authorize but actively to promote nuclear activity.
• Communication and transparency strategies, for example publicly accessible, traceable digital reports on waste management, project progress, and financial performance.

In parallel, the international context opens a window of opportunity. Argentina has built up decades of expertise in nuclear engineering, reactor operation, component manufacturing, and human resource training. This is an asset that few countries possess. Opening the sector to private investment and to public-private partnerships would make it possible to deliver high-impact projects with international reach.

If the country manages to overcome its political and regulatory barriers, it can position itself in a global landscape in which nuclear energy is once again central. Otherwise, it will prolong its stagnation and remain on the sidelines of a key opportunity for its technological, export, and energy development.

This article is a synthesis of the paper “Nuclear Energy in Argentina and Its Political-Legal Crossroads” which develops in depth the regulatory framework, historical conflicts, and proposals to unblock the sector. The full document is available athttps://www.researchgate.net/publication/400583195_Nuclear_Energy_in_Argentina_and_Its_Political-Legal_Crossroads.

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Notes

¹Stenographic transcript of the legislative debate on file 590/17, Legislature of the Province of Río Negro, 31 August 2017, p. 78 onwards. https://web.legisrn.gov.ar/legislativa/sesiones/documento?id=991&d=diario

 ²In the August 2017 national legislative PASO elections, the senatorial candidate for Juntos Somos Río Negro, Fabián Gatti, came in third with approximately 18 percent of the vote, behind Frente para la Victoria and Cambiemos.