ON ENGINEER’S DAY, THE STORY OF TWO BROTHERS WHO WORK FOR THE CNEA
|
16/06/2021
They are brothers.
One is thirty-three years old.
The other, thirty-one.
But Emanuel and Nicolás share much more than the surname (which, in all this, is Giménez).
Both were received in the same race, which, in itself, seems to be one more piece of information.
Now, when you take into account that this career is that of a nuclear engineer, things change a lot.
Having a nuclear engineer in a family is not common, considering, for example, the small amount that is received per year at the Balseiro Institute. Therefore, that there are two is a fact that escapes statistics.
Next week it will be ten years since Emanuel earned his degree.
Emanuel
Remember that it was “on June 24, 2011, shortly after the volcano erupted.”
“I’m not going to forget any more,” he says.
That time, the volcanic ash ruined much of the festivities, with relatives and authorities unable to reach the city.
But the issue here, more than the eruption of the Puyehue -which is clearly an issue, but not to deal with this time-, is the coincidence in the choice of the race.
“We always liked science,” says Emanuel, the older brother, and mentions that a determining factor was maternal influence.
Now, the reason for the importance of the mother is not what one can imagine.
Emanuel and Nicolás were born in Cipolletti.
When they were young, the family moved to Santiago del Estero, due to the father’s labor issues.
In that place, where the heat leads to the obligatory siesta, the brothers did not want to know anything about going to sleep during the afternoon.
And there the mother used her ingenuity.
He thought of reading them something, but clearly a story, at that time, would not bring sleep, but rather could get to awaken the attention of children and wake them up, so he opted for other types of books.
An aunt, who was a teacher, had given them encyclopedias called Tecnirama, to use when they had to do homework for school.
Obviously, going through those science manuals aloud to them, the boys fell asleep. The objective was accomplished.
What the mother did not imagine is that, as much as the children did not understand too much of these readings, they retained something.
“This is how our approach to science began,” Emanuel points out.
“For example, he talked to us about inertia (which is the property of bodies to maintain their state of rest or movement if it is not by the action of a force), and we made jokes with that and we read it again,” he says.
“At school we had a great facility for exact sciences, such as mathematics, so since we were little we knew that we were going that way,” he adds.
And he reveals that the mother also had to do with the choice of the Balseiro as a place to continue learning, since she used to tell them about that institute when the subject of the career arose.
“I really liked the nuclear engineering profile, because it is not only about applied science, but it also has a very important technological vein”, Emanuel details.
Nicholas
Nicolás, meanwhile, laughingly recalls that, in his case, there was something that happened in high school that made him look favorably on nuclear energy: “They told us that, with nuclear reactions, you could convert mercury into gold.” comments.
“The old dream of the alchemist”, Emanuel tells him, to which Nicolás adds: “At that moment, I thought: ‘I want to be one of those guys’”.
“The physical process they described to us was fascinating to trigger a boy’s imagination,” he says.
“That’s when I decided on nuclear energy,” says Nicolás, who finally never transmuted mercury into gold, since his research took it elsewhere, although he did meet several engineers who had done it.
As much as they agreed on the choice of the career, it was not something that they solved together, but rather they reached the same conclusion, but each one analyzing it for their part.
At one point they wrote an email to the Balseiro, without thinking that they would answer them, but the answer came, and with a clear explanation about what careers they could follow for two years and then take the rigorous entrance course that you have to go through to be in the entity, and thus study the remaining three years.
At that time, they had long since returned to Cipolletti, and in the local library they found a book called The Student Guide.
They saw the study plans of all the careers, and, among those feasible to later continue their studies in Bariloche, they leaned towards mechanical engineering, because they noticed that it was “the one that had the most mathematics and physics,” as reported.
So they attended the Comahue University in Neuquén for two years, and then, first Emanuel, and later Nicolás, arrived at the Balseiro to become nuclear engineers.
Currently, both work for the National Atomic Energy Commission (CNEA), and are part of the Carem 25 project, the first nuclear power reactor designed and built entirely in Argentina.
–
