ROUGH DRAFT

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The Huemul Project was a secret advanced project proposed by the Austrian scientist, of German origin, 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 energy before any other country. At that time Argentina was among the wealthiest countries of the world and had available the resources that such an endeavour might have required. Notably, the project was adopted by Perón without any consultation with scientists. In 1951 an announcement of successful control of a thermonuclear reaction was made which was followed by promises of cheap energy. However, the controlled reaction was proven to be false and the project was terminated one year later on the advice of scientific committees.

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[BACKGROUND IN CONTEXT]

[PRESENT STATE COMPARED WITH WWII]

The present state of the art in fusion research is, for example, the ITER multinational project which uses a tokamak-like configuration. This is the result of decades of research and development, with design and implementation far removed from Richter's simple but flawed original device.

Already during World War II following Guderley's famous convergent shock wave solution, German scientists under Kurt Diebner and Walther 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 the book by Rainer Karlsch entitled "Hitlers Bombe" (DVA, Germany, 2005). A contrasting account follows from Mariscotti´s exhaustive book. According to this (see references) Richter worked during the war as a collaborator of Manfred von Ardenne, but in a separate private laboratory of his own. The work on fusion he presumable carried on there remains unknown because it was never published in the peer reviewed literature.

The Project

Late in 1949 construction of the laboratories in Huemul Island (Isla Huemul in the Nahuel Huapi Lake), was initiated. Two years later, in March 1951, Richter informed Perón that the experiments had been successful and the government announced on March 24 1951:

"On February 16, 1951, in the... Isla Huemul ... thermonuclear reactions under controlled conditions were performed on a technical scale."

The Argentine claim to have achieved fusion was wrong, but so was the later, widely publicized British claim that fusion had been achieved with the Zeta device. The subsequent worldwide race over controlled fusion research was influenced to some extent by the press announcement from Argentina.

Richter's erratic behavior after the announcement, and the delays in passing from the 'technical scale' to an 'industrial scale' promised by Richter, persuaded some officials in Peron's government to insist on a re-evaluation of the project. Finally, a group of Argentine scientists was appointed to study the scientific merit of the project. This group, led by physicist José Antonio Balseiro, concluded that Richter's claims were unsustainable. Richter experimented with the acoustic heating of high temperature arcs, but Balseiro's calculations, and the analysis of his apparatus by Báncora (another member of the commission) made a strong case against the suitability of this method of attaining fusion. A second independent commission endorsed the conclusions of the first one, and the project was terminated in 1952. Richter had grossly underestimated the technical difficulties of achieving controlled fusion and had erroneously interpreted the results of his experiments. In particular he had opposed verification of a measurement flawed by a widening of a spectral line due to wrong positioning (tilting) of the photographic plate.

The amount of resources spent on the Huemul project are precisely known thanks to a report written by Dr. Teófilo Isnardi et. al., published in 1958. After the fall of Perón's government in September 1955, opponents to Perón painted a value for the budget of the project in a wall of Richter's Laboratory No. 4 (a photograph can be seen in Mariscotti's book, see references) claiming that the total expenses were 62 million pesos (the amount stated in Isnardi's report), which at that time represented approximately 7 million USD, or about 140 times the amount allocated by the U.S. government soon after the Argentine announcement (Project Matterhorn, under Lyman Spitzer). A recent estimate has been published by M. Cardona et. al., in their biography of Falicov (see references). They state that the total cost of the project was equivalent to 300 million USD at current values (of 2003). This amount is small compared to the expenditures made by other nations in later efforts, but it is significant because it credits Argentina as the first country to give official support to a nuclear fusion program for peaceful purposes.

Today, the Huemul island with the ruins of the historic facilities (at 41°06′23″S 71°23′42″W / 41.10639°S 71.39500°W / -41.10639; -71.39500), can be visited by tourists. It is reached by boat from the port of Bariloche.

References

Guderley, G., 1942, Luftfahrforschung 19, 302.
Mariscotti, Mario, 1985, El Secreto Atómico de Huemul: Crónica del Origen de la Energía Atómica en la Argentina, Sudamericana/Planeta, Buenos Aires, Argentina ISBN: 9503701090
Mariscotti, Mario. El secreto atómico de Huemul, 3. ed. Buenos Aires, Argentina: Estudio Sigma, c1996. 286 p. : ill. ; 23 cm. ISBN: 9509446246
Mariscotti, M., 2004, El secreto Atómico de Huemul, Ed. Estudio Sigma, Buenos Aires.
Falicov's biography National Academy of Sciences: Biographical Memoirs, VOL 83, 2003, THE NATIONAL ACADEMY PRESS, WASHINGTON, D.C.

External links

Balseiro's Report (1952) PDF - Spanish
López Dávalos, Arturo y Badino, Norma (1988). Antecedentes Históricos del Instituto Balseiro - Spanish
Horacio Luis Varela: Litio: Materia Prima para la Tecnología de la Fusión Termonuclear (1997) Spanish
Mic. Ramón Regés: Proyecto Huemul (1999) Spanish
Guillermo Giménez de Castro: La quimera atómica de Richter (2004) Spanish
Raul A. Montenegro: Will Atucha II survive the truth? PDF - WISE/NIRS Nuclear Monitor, November 12, 2004

From Physics Today

[[Category:Science and technology in Argentina]]

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Argentina's Nuclear research was re-organized around the Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica (National Atomic Energy Commission) and a new Nuclear Plan (fission-based) was started to develop peaceful uses of Nuclear Energy. Argentina has two operational Nuclear Electric power stations, one built by German (Siemens)and other by Canadian (CANDU) companies. A third one has been delayed by financial and other problems and recently (2003) the government has anounced its commitement to complete the project.

In 1955, Balseiro took the direction of the recently created Instituto de Física de Bariloche, now Instituto Balseiro, where he taught electromagnetism, and many other subjects. The institute has recently (2005), celebrated 50 years of uninterrupted research and academic activities. In partnership with its associated research centre, the Centro Atómico Bariloche, it has trained a couple of hundred physicists and engineers and produced hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers as well as other important contributions to applied and basic science in Argentina. These achievements have not received the wide publicity given to Richter's results, but they have met stricter scientific requirements. Although Power Reactors in the hundreds of Megawatt range have not been built by Argentina on its own, INVAP a company started by graduates of the Instituto Balseiro and located in Bariloche, has exported research reactors of less than a Megawatt to Peru, Algeria, Egypt and most recently to Australia.

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