Huemul Project

The Huemul Project was an advanced project proposed by the Austrian, of German origin, scientist Ronald Richter to the government of Argentina during the first presidency of Juan Domingo Perón, in 1948. Richter convinced Perón that he could produce nuclear fusion before any other country and deliver it in milk-bottle type/size containers. The present incarnation of esentially the same idea is the highly publicized ITER multinational project. Wound into a closed ring, Richter's device becomes a tokamak-like configuration.

The subsecuent worldwide career in controlled fusion research was triggered by an erroneous Argentinean press announcement made on march 24 1951.

Some time later, a group of Argentine scientists were appointed to study the capabilities of the project. This group was led by physicist José Antonio Balseiro, which after an investigation saw his opportunity and concluded that Richter's claims were impossible, and the project was closed and substituted by the very expensive and faulty Argentinian Nuclear Plan. As a result José Antonio Balseiro took the direction of the recently created Instituto de Física de Bariloche, where he taught electromagnetism.

The group led by José Antonio Balseiro was integrated by 5 physicists, 20 congresists and a priest, father Bussolini, a jesuist who studied astronomy, all of them choosen by the Government. During the Comission visit to the Huemul Island many irregularities were observed, like unplugged instruments which were supposedly measuring. While congresists and father Bussolini were impressed by Richter, the physicists were not. Some of them carried their own instruments (gamma detectors) which did not register any nuclear reaction while Richter conducted some nuclear experiments. The scientists later asked technical questions to the leader of the project and the answers were considered unsatisfactory. After the visit, every member of the group of scientists wrote a report (being the most conclusive the one written by José Antonio Balseiro, see external links below) with a common conclusion: there were no basis to support Richter statements about the achievement in his laboratories of controlled nuclear fusion reactions. Richter defended his project with a written answer but the Comission found nothing new in the arguments. The government then created a new Commission formed this time by Dr. Richard Gans (a renown scientist of German origin) and Dr. Antonio Rodríguez, disciple of Max Born in Edinburgh, who analysed both the Comission Reports and Richter Answer and concluded that the project had no grounds to be continued.

Already during WWII following Guderley’s famous convergent shock wave solution, German scientists under Diebner and Gerlach carried out large experiments to explore the possibility to induce thermonuclear reactions in deuterium with high explosive-driven convergent shock waves. At the same time Richter proposed in a memorandum to German Government officials to induce nuclear fusion reactions through shock waves by high-velocity particles shot in a highly compressed ordinary uranium containing deuterium plasma. References regarding these claims can be found in a very recently published book by R. Karlsch entitled “Hitler’s Bombe” DVA, Germany, 2005. In Argentina Richter experimented with the acoustic heating of high temperature arcs. Most of those scientists who try to belittle his work have never done anything of importance by themselves. Nobody in Argentina, specially those engaged with Balseiro's academic heritage, understood and could appreciate Richter's research.

The amounts of monetary resources spent are precisally known thanks to a report writen by Dr. Teófilo Isnardi, et. al. published in 1958. After the fall of Peron's Government in September 1955, oppositors to Perón painted a value for the budget of the project in a wall of Richter's Laboratory Nr 4 (a photograph can be seen in Mariscotti's book, see references) claiming that the total expenses were 62 Million Pesos, which at that time (1955) represented approximately 7 Million USD, or about 140 times the amout allocated by US government at that time. A recent estimate has been published by Manuel Cardona, Marvin L. Cohen, and Steven G. Louie, in their biography of Falicov (see references). They state that the total cost of the project has been estimated at $300 million USD in today’s value (2005?). This amount, however, is small in comparison to the expenditures for the so far unsuccessful worldwide later efforts, but significant enough to credit Argentine Nation as the first one on this planet to support officially a nuclear fusion program for pacific uses.

Late in 1949 construction of the laboratories in Isla Huemul (in the Nahuel Huapi Lake), was initiated. 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."

Richter's claim to have achieved fusion was wrong, of course, but so was the later, also widely publicized British claim that fusion had been achieved with the Zeta device.

Richter had grossly underestimated the technical difficulties of achieving controlled fusion, but so had everybody else.

The irony is that the Academic Institution that was established on Richter's project ashes, through the Nuclear Engineers that they are forming today, nor even can finish the conventional fission plant Atucha II, after that the corresponding division of the German firm Siemens KWU was disbanded.

Today, the Huemul island with the ruins of the historic facilities, 41º06'23"S, 71º23'42"W, can be visited by tourists. It is reached by boat from Bariloche's port. Dr. Mariscotti owns a property in "Playa Bonita" shore near the Huemul island that used to rent to Intitute Balseiro's students.

The Huemul Project has inspired an opera.

Richter, The Opera: A Musical Documentary

References

Guderley, G., 1942, Luftfahrforschung 19, 302.

Mariscotti, M., 2004, El secreto Atómico de Huemul, Ed. Estudio Sigma, Buenos Aires.
Mariscotti, Mario. El Secreto Atomico de Huemul Sudamericana/Planeta, Buenos Aires, Argentina ISBN: 9503701090