On July 3, 2008, the price of oil hit $145 a barrel on world markets. Uruguay, sits between Brazil to the north and Argentina to the west. It’s eastern and southern border is the Atlantic Ocean. Uruguay has no domestic source of oil and so every drop of oil it needs has to be imported. In 2008, demand for electricity grew by 8.4 percent and homeowners were seeing their utility bills increasing by a similar amount. Desperate for a solution, president Tabaré Vázquez turned to an unlikely source — Ramón Méndez Galain, a physicist with a background in nuclear power. “I had been working abroad for 14 years, and when I came back, there…
