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The Huemul Project was a secret project that intended to build a nuclear fusion plant in Argentina. It was conceived by the Austrian, of German origin, scientist Ronald Richter who proposed it to the government of Argentina during the first presidency of Juan Domingo Perón, in 1948. Richter convinced Perón that he could produce energy from nuclear fusion before any other country.
Late in 1949 construction of the laboratories was started on the Huemul island (in Nahuel Huapi Lake). In March 1951 Richter informed Perón that the experiments had been successful and the government announced:
"On February 16, 1951, in the . . . Isla Huemul . . . thermonuclear reactions under controlled conditions were performed on a technical scale."
In October 1952, a group of Argentine scientists was appointed for a technical and scientific evaluation of the project. The leading physicist of this group was José Antonio Balseiro. After visiting the island and interviewing Richter, the review panel concluded that his claims were impossible. A second independent commission endorsed the conclusions of the first and the project was promptly terminated.
This project was the first Nuclear activity in the country, although, after Richter, the research was focused on nuclear fission rather than nuclear fusion. Peaceful uses of nuclear energy were the goal. The expensive and sophisticated pieces of equipment bought by the Huemul Project and some of its administrative and technical personnel were incorporated into the newly created Instituto de Física. It is now named Instituto Balseiro, after its creator and first director José Antonio Balseiro. A research center, the Centro Atómico Bariloche (CAB), was also established as a sister institution, under the Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica. Today, the Huemul Island with the ruins of the historic facilities can be visited by tourists. It is reached by boat from Bariloche's port.
The secrecy and lack of public information about the Huemul Project, strongly bound to Peron's government, gave origin to many debates (as still does Peron's government itself) and fostered the appearance of many rumors soon converted into legends and myths. The external links listed below may provide some insight. The passionate character of Richter is described in the biographical article Ronald Richter.
Some authors claim that the international impact of Perón's announcement of March 1951 triggered the American Nuclear Fusion Plan.
History of the Project[edit]
Origins[edit]
Ronald Richter was introduced to Perón by the German aeronautical engineer Kurt Tank who met him in London just after the end of WWII. Tank moved to Argentina hired by Perón's government to start a program to develop military airplanes. At that time Argentina tried, as the other allied powers did, to take advantage of the German engineers and scientists who wanted to flee their war-ravaged country. Richter's background included some work in the 1930s in atomic research in Berlin when he had proposed to the Nazi government the construction of a nuclear reactor. The project was rejected (Karlsch, 2005).
Richter made a good impression on Kurt Tank, with his idea of propelling fighter jets with nuclear energy. When Tank arrived in Argentina he recommended Richter for employment in his plant located in the Córdoba Province. Richter met Perón on August 24, 1948, soon after arriving in Argentina. They talked about Richter's ideas to make a nuclear fusion reactor. Perón found Richter's arguments very convincing. According to Richter, his reactor would cost one to two orders of magnitud less than a nuclear fission reactor. Moreover it would be developed faster than the programms already in progress at that time, namely, the plans for peaceful use of nuclear energy being developed by the Americans, English and Soviets. Perón embraced the idea inmediately without seeking any expert advice, being guided by his own instinct. He gave Richter a large budget and essentially a free hand, the scientist would report only to Perón himself.
The project was initiated in the mountain city of Villa del Lago in Córdoba Province. In early 1949 a fire in Richter's laboratory was interpreted by the scientist as sabotage and an attempt at espionage. Perón proposed then to move the laboratory to a new location in the Argentinian Patagonia. Richter made aerial surveys of the region until he discovered an attractive site at Bariloche on the shore of Nahuel Huapi Lake. Close to the lake shore, at Playa Bonita there is an island named Huemul that Richter considered to be a perfect place for a secret project. The choice created many logistic problems because Bariloche was a very small town in the 1950's. A new power plant had to be constructed in the Island just for the project. All the materials, equipment, personnel had to be transported by ferries from the port of Bariloche to the island. And, to protect the installations, there was available a whole battalion (the 2nd Battalion of the 21st Regiment of Mountain Infantry). However, for this top priority project there were no limits, no means were to be spared.
Spectacular Results[edit]
Work in the island started on July 1949. Four laboratories were built, one of them came to be known as The Great Reactor. It was an impressive 12m high and 12m wide cylinder made of concrete, with no iron reinforcement. Its walls had a thickness of 8m, leaving a central cavity of 4m diameter. However, soon after the building was completed, Richter ordered its demolition claiming that it was not built well. The second Great Reactor would be as big as the first but would be buried 12m deep in the mountain bedrock.
Meanwhile, experiments started. On February 16, 1951, after analysing the spectrogram of a lithium and hydrogen plasma exposed to electrical discharges, Richter concluded that nuclear fusion had been produced. Perón was inmediately informed, but the public announcement was delayed until March 24, 1951. The next day's headline of the pro-government newspaper Democracia was five columns wide and said:
Perón's Amazing Announcement: Argentina achieved Controlled Atomic Energy.
Richter was raised to genius status by the Argentine press. Consequently he received many honours, including Doctor Honoris Causa awarded by the University of Buenos Aires. Gambini (1999) advanced the hypothesis that Perón delayed this sensational announcement so that he could divert foreign attention from the confiscation of a major newspaper by his regdime. In fact, this attack to press freedom was pushed way back to the inner pages of the New York Times while Richter's project made the first page.
The announcement was widely echoed outside the country. The New York Times published a series of articles about the subject during the following week. The scientific community also discussed, with great skepticism, the reality behind Richters announcement. However, there was a change of perception, and some came to accept that, although very difficult, harnessing nuclear fusion for energy production might not be impossible. Thus new impulse was given to this line of research outside Argentina. As told by Lyman Spitzer the spectacular announcement inspired him to start the nuclear fusion research named Project Matterhorn, at Princeton.
On May 31, 1950, the Argentinian Government had created the National Commission of Atomic Energy (CNEA, in Spanish, described in the article Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica) to provide administrative support to the project. Its director was Perón himself. Richter's refusal to hire Argentine scientists in Huemul and pressure from the argentinian scientific community, forced the government to create in May 1951, one year after the spectacular announcement, another organism. This was named National Direction of Atomic Energy (DNEA, in Spanish). For this new organization, many young physiscists and chemists were hired to work on nuclear research (Hurtado de Mendoza, 2005).
The End[edit]
After the 1951 announcement, Richter did not present new evidence of nuclear fusion in his laboratories. Instead of results, Richter requested that the project be moved to a different place, in the desert. This whimsical behavoir and Richter's hard-to-deal-with character lowered the confidence that some of the members of Perón's government had on the project. Even Kurt Tank wrote a memo suggesting that more information was needed and that Richter alone would not attain success. Col. González, the liaison between Perón and Richter, resigned and was replaced by Cap. P. E. Iralagoitía who then inspected the project. Although he was not a scientist, the visit left on Iraolagoitía the impression that the whole project was a fraud. He convinced Perón to appoint a commission to inspect the Laboratories and write a report.
The commission was integrated with four scientists: Manuel Beninson (Eng. and Naval Cap.) who studied Physics in France in the 1910s and was member of the CNEA, Otto Gamba (Eng.) graduated from Illinois, worked on Nuclear physics in the Poincaré's Institute in Paris; Mário Báncora (Eng.), who worked in California and then built a Cyclotron Accelerator in Rosario (Argentina) and José Antonio Balseiro a physicist from La Plata who went to Manchester with a British Council Fellowship to work with Rosenfeld. The fifth member was the only one chosen by Perón: Father Juan Bussolini, a jesuit priest who studied astronomy but had not completed the coursework.
The five members arrived to the island in company of 20 legislators on September 5, 1952. While the jesuit and the legislators were well impressed by the experiments carried on by Richter, the four scientists had only doubts. They verified that some instruments were incorrectly set up and thus could not provide significant measurements. They delayed their return to Buenos Aires one day longer than planned, in order to make it possible to discuss technical points with Richter. The discussions didn't bring new insights, being the central issue how would the nuclear fusion be attained at such low temperatures? The lack of a clear answer convinced the scientists that Richter did not have any. Richter has always stated that this was a secret he could not reveal.
Every member of the commission wrote a separate report, and then a brief general conclusion was drafted. The only one who accepted the presentations by Richter as evidence of fusion was Father Bussolini, nonetheless he suggested that new clarifications should be presented. Balseiro's report was one of the most definitive. He discussed the impossibility of a cold fusion. The general conclusion was that
the Technical Commission didn't have evidences that could justify Richter statements.
Perón demanded from Richter the submission of a written reply. This was sent on October 11, 1952. The Technical Commission didn't find new clues and upheld its opinion. Mario Báncora was able to reproduce the experimental results of Richter, but without any hydrogen and lithium, that is, without the fusionable elements. Even this conclusive experiment didn't convince all the members of the government about the falacy of Richter's results.
A new commission was appointed. This one was composed by only two members: Prof. Richard Gans, of German origin, and Prof. Antonio Rodríguez an Argentine disciple of Max Born in Edimburgh. This new commission read all the reports and arrived soon to a conclusion: the spectacular announcement was pure fantasy. Perón requested that the Commission met Richter to discuss. Some days later a new report was sent to Perón:
From the analysis of the reports it is inferred that there are no experimental and theoretical proofs of the achievement of nuclear reactions.
On November 22, 1952, Richter was dismissed. He remained for a few months in Bariloche. Some members of the commission visited the island to discuss which of the generation of costly equipments could be salvaged. Some years later, in 1955, an Institute of Physics Studies was created in the land, near the Huemul Island. Part of the equipment, even part of the technical and administrative staff that worked with Richter went to this institute. Its first director was the late José A. Balseiro who passed away, unfortunately, early in his professional life. The institute now receives his name. Among its very known professors we mention Enrique Gaviola. And in his rooms studied some of the most famous Argentinian Physicist, like Leo Falicov and Juan Maldacena.
The Science of the Project[edit]
We know from Karlsch's Hitlers Bombe that Richter's work during World War II was analysed by the Operation Paperclip. Upon declassified papers, Richter worked with Heinrich Rausch von Traubenberg who was the first to try the lithium fusion, and later in 1943, for a short time with Manfred Baron von Ardenne. Richter's last work was in the Research & Development department of the AEG transformers factory. Richter wanted to develop a method to induce nuclear reactions by means of sound shock waves in lithium and boron embedded in a high pressure deuterium plasma. The project of a nuclear reactor was presented to Col. Friederich Geist, leader of the Ministry of Armaments Research & Development group who declined any cooperation. Richter's role in the nazi nuclear research was marginal. The only reason we know about it, is because it was analysed by the allies during the postwar. Many other scientists from Germany and Austria worked in similar projects, but no written testimony arrived to us. (Karlsch, 2005)
What was really new in Richter's approach? Thermonuclear reactions involving lithium were already known before Richter went to work with Traubenberg. The heating method by means of discharges and sound waves (the singing arc) were invented by William Du Bois Dudell in 1899. The maximum expected temperature of such a plasma could be around 100,000 K. At this temperature, the percentage of lithium nucleii that could fuse is insignificantly small.
In thermal equilibrium, atoms do not have the same energy. Some have more, some have less. The Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution law gives us the percentage of particles with a given energy. Normal temperature of thermonuclear reactions is 100 million degrees (this is why we call it thermonuclear). Nonetheless, at 40 million degrees, the Maxwell-Boltzmann distribution law grants that at least 1% of them have the required energy for fusion.
Therefore, Richter's effort could be better classified as cold fusion, which is today a controversial issue. Richter claimed that his method changed the statistical properties of the plasma, in other words, that the Maxwell distribution should not apply. But he never published a scientific work explaining his ideas nor gave, at least, consistent answers to the scientific commissions that analysed his work.
Richter's demonstrations[edit]
What were the scientific or thechnical bases behind the 1951 announcement? Every time Richter switched on his discharge machine, Geiger counters signaled detection events. Was it ionizing radiation, which would be interpreted as coming from the nuclear reactions in the plasma? Mario Báncora, member of the scientific commission has shown that the Dudell singing arc creates false counts in Geiger counting equipment. He was even able to reproduce Richter's observations, with the same equipment but without any fusionable element inside. (For a partial translation of Báncora's report see Luzuriaga (2005). Until today the best test for nuclear reactions is the detection of gamma radiation which was never detected in Richter's experiments.
The spectacular announcement of 1951 was based on the wrong analisys of a spectrogram. Richter observed a blueshift of the spectral lines and interpreted as an increase of the energy of the gas. In other words, an increase in the temperature of the gas (Mariscoti, 1985). First of all, he never gave quantitative results: how much the temperature had increased. Last, but not least, the conclusion was wrong. A shift in the spectral lines doesn't mean an increase in temperature. In case of a gas in thermal equilibrium, the increase would make the lines wider. In any case, there are sufficient doubts that the shift was apparent, due to an artifact originating from a malfunctioning device (Mariscotti, 1985).
References[edit]
KARLSCH, Reiner, 2005, Hitlers Bombe, Ed. Dva, Germany, pp 146-147. ISBN: 342-10-5809-1.
HURTADO DE MENDOZA, Diego, 2005, Autonomy, even Regional Hegemony: Argentina and the "Hard Way" toward Its First Research Reactor (1945-1958), Science in Context, Cambridge University Press, 18, 2, 285-308.
MARISCOTTI, Mario, 1985, El secreto Atómico de Huemul, 1st Edition, Ed. Sudamericana-Planeta, Buenos Aires, Argentina. ISBN: 950-37-0109-0
External links[edit]
- Balseiro's Report PDF - Spanish
- López Dávalos, Arturo y Badino, Norma. Antecedentes Históricos del Instituto Balseiro
Article and letters published by Physics Today[edit]
- Juan G. Roederer (2003). The article describes the history of cosmic radiation research in Argentina and describes the Huemul Project.
[[Category:Science and technology in Argentina]]