ITER NEWSLINE 196

26 Oct, 2011

"Proyecto Huemul:" the prank that started it all

Robert Arnoux

In the spring of 1951, less than one

decade after Enrico Fermi initiated
the first self-sustained fission
reaction in a stack of uranium and
graphite blocks, newspapers from
all over the world
carried sensational news: in
Argentina, thanks to a "new
method" described by The New
York Times as "linked to the Sun,"
scientists had just discovered a new
way to make atom yield power.

The source of this worldwide Construction of a large research facility began in 1949 on Isla
Huemul, a lake island at the foot of the Andes close to the city of
excitement was a news conference San Carlos de Bariloche.
that had been held on 24 March in
Buenos Aires by Argentinian president Juan Perón. Argentina, he claimed, had
successfully produced "the controlled liberation of atomic energy," not through
uranium fuel, but rather through the simplest and lightest of all elements, hydrogen.
The discovery, he added, was "transcendental for the future life" of his nation and
would bring "a greatness which today we cannot imagine."

For the scientific world this discovery had a name: "controlled thermonuclear
fusion."

How could Argentina, then a largely rural immigrant nation of barely 16 million
inhabitants, have achieved what the US and the Soviet Union had not even begun
contemplating? Fusing light atoms was certainly a top priority for the two nations
racing to build the hydrogen bomb. But the US was still a year and a half away
from detonating its first thermonuclear device—a milestone the Soviets would not
achieve before August 1953.

In this context, claiming that controlled fusion had been achieved was hardly
believable. And promising, as Perón did, a future where energy would be "sold in
half-litre bottles, like milk," did nothing to convince the world scientific
community.

Perón's claim was based on the works of an Austrian-born scientist and recent
immigrant to Argentina named Ronald Richter (1909-1991). However obscure at
the time, Richter had succeeded in convincing the authorities to build and fund a
large fusion lab on the remote mountain lake island of Isla Huemul. There, in the
Andean wilderness, Perón's "new Argentina" would demonstrate to the world that it
could play in the same league as the US and the Soviet Union.

Was Ronald Richter, pictured here with his wife,
daughter and cat, ''a clever impostor or a scientific
nut,'' or maybe even a genius? The controversy was
revived in a 2003 issue of Physics Today.
Millions of pesos were poured into the
secret Proyecto Huemul (in today's euros,
close to 250 million); a 40-foot high
concrete bunker was built to shelter the
"reactor" and in a matter of years, Richter
and his small crew had their operation
running. On 16 February 1951 they
reported a "net positive result" for the first
time: hydrogen, fed into an electric arc, had
reached a temperature sufficient to produce
fusion reactions, duly measured by way of
a... Geiger counter.

It didn't take the international scientific community very long to dismiss the Perón-
Richter claim as a total prank, the first in a long series of such unverifiable
assertions and unreproducible experiments that were to punctuate the history of
fusion research.

Richter was eventually jailed for having "misled" President Perón and having
embarrassed him on the international scene, but the unveiling of Proyecto Huemul
triggered what is now recognized as the first decisive step into serious research in
controlled fusion.

Every fusion history book tells the story of how Lyman Spitzer, then a 36-year-old
astrophysicist attached to the US "H" bomb program, received a phone call from his
father telling him about the news from Argentina; how he pondered for days, while
skiing in Aspen, Colorado, about the possibility of confining a hot plasma in a
magnetic field; and how, eventually, he presented the newly formed US Atomic
Energy Commission with a proposal to build a "magnetic bottle" within which the
fire of the Sun and stars could be reproduced.

A little more than two years later, in the fall of 1953, Spitzer's "figure 8 stellarator"
was ready for experiments, marking the true beginning of the long, arduous and
often frustrating road that eventually led to ITER.

The dust of history has long since settled

on Proyecto Huemul, but the question
remains as to whether Richter was a half-
mad scientist or a genuine pioneer in fusion
research. Quite unexpectedly, in 2003, the
question found its way into the science
magazine Physics Today.

The publication of an article about

scientific research in Argentina in the
All that remains of Proyecto Huemul today is the 40-
1950s (Jan 2003, Vol. 56, N°1), which foot-high concrete bunker that housed Richter's
touched on the issue of Richter and ''reactor.''
Proyecto Huemul, triggered an interesting
exchange between the article's author, physicist Juan Roederer, and physicist and
fusion activist Friedwardt Winterberg of the University of Nevada.

Responding to the article's affirmation that Richter was a "physicist/impostor,"

Winterberg argued in the "Letters to the Editor" section of the magazine that
"Richter's work was not far off from what was done in the US [at the time] and
[that] some of his ideas, like ion acoustic plasma heating, were new."

Roederer admitted in return that it was "difficult to determine whether Richter was a
clever impostor or a scientific nut." His letter concluded with a quote from Edward
Teller—a towering figure in nuclear physics if there ever was one—who had once
said: "Reading one line [of Richter's] one has to think he's a genius. Reading the
next line, one realizes he's crazy."

More in this Feb 2011 article from Wired magazine and in this detailed report
(in German) on the Richter Experiment. For further insight into fusion's rocky
history, you can also read Robin Herman's book Fusion: The Search for
Endless Energy and Charles Seife's Sun in a bottle, The Strange History of
Fusion and the Science of Wishful Thinking.

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