"Proyecto Huemul:" the prank that started it all

 

The source of this worldwide excitement was a news conference 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.

 

 

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 publication of an article about scientific research in Argentina in the 1950s (Jan 2003, Vol. 56, N°1), which touched on the issue of Richter and 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."