WITHIN days of moving to Argentina, Ronald Richter stood before the president. The Austrian physicist had an incredible pitch: he’d found a way of generating unlimited, controlled energy from the power of a tiny sun. He had, he said, cracked the challenge of nuclear fusion.
It was 1948, and President Juan Perón was looking for new technologies to foster economic independence. His plan to create a “New Argentina” hinged on industrial growth, but his uncompromising style had alienated much of the country’s scientific community.
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So he was eager to hear ideas from European scientists leaving their homelands in the wake of the second world war. Richter had worked in his father’s lab in Germany, and met Nazi aircraft designer Kurt Tank after the war. Tank was intrigued by Richter’s idea of using nuclear energy to fuel aircraft, so when Tank was later brought to Argentina by Perón, he recommended Richter. Richter met Perón and told him of a technique that could use cheap and readily available elements to emulate the process that powers the sun – and the president was entranced. Here was a man with just the technology to propel Argentina into the future. Richter was given the chance, and the money, to build this new reactor.
It was the nuclear era, but nuclear fission, discovered in 1938, was so far the only game in town. Whereas fusion releases energy by forcing together the nuclei of lighter elements, such as hydrogen, fission does so by splitting the large nuclei of heavier elements, such as uranium and plutonium. It was fission that unleashed the destructive power of the atomic bombs developed by the Manhattan Project, and is what drives today’s nuclear plants.
Fusion is an altogether different proposition. The isotopes of lighter atoms need conditions of extreme pressure and temperature before they can unite. In the sun, for example, hydrogen atoms fuse to make helium at temperatures of 15 million kelvin and pressures many billions of times greater than atmospheric pressure on Earth.
So fusion investigators started with hydrogen’s heavier isotopes, which unite at far lower pressures but need even hotter conditions. Richter said he could create a searing plasma at the required temperature of around 100 million kelvin. And the kicker? He could control and contain this reaction.
Richter spent some $300 million (by today’s standards) of public funds building a facility worthy of a James Bond villain. His fusion container turned out to be a concrete bunker 11 metres tall, built on a small island within a mountain lake in the foothills of the Andes. On Isla Huemul, off the shore of the picturesque Patagonian town of San Carlos de Bariloche, Richter’s project proceeded in secrecy. Within two years, 400 men working round the clock built the bunker and other facilities, overseen by Richter. His purchases included 20,000 bags of cement, powerful loudspeakers and a 50-tonne copper coil.
In February 1951, Richter said he had performed the first successful experiment with his fusion reactor. If he was right, it would be one of the greatest scientific discoveries of the 20th century: it seemed that Perón’s gamble had paid off. Later that month, Perón summoned the press to his mansion and, with much self-satisfaction, announced the breakthrough. He vaguely described Richter’s approach, before claiming that, without the need for uranium, “this new method produced controlled liberation of atomic energy”. He called Richter’s work “transcendental” for the future life of all Argentines, and, “I have no doubt, for that of the world”. Soon energy would be sold in half-litre bottles, like milk.
The New York Times reported the astonishing news on its front page and printed Perón’s crowing announcement. But his moment of glory was met with near-universal scepticism. David Lilienthal, former head of the US Atomic Energy Commission, was asked if there was even the slightest chance that the unpublished, unknown Richter had achieved what he claimed. “Less than that,” he replied.
The results of Richter’s experiments were never published, and he refused to say how he had reached the required temperatures. And he would only hint at how he controlled the reaction: “When an atomic bomb explodes without control, there is terrible destruction. I have been able to control the explosion so that it develops slowly and gradually.”
“Richter spent $300 million building a facility worthy of a James Bond villain“
With political and media pressure mounting, in 1952 Perón assembled a team to investigate. The resulting report by physicist José Antonio Balseiro was damning. It revealed that Richter’s method was to feed hydrogen into an electric arc at which loudspeakers were pointed to increase the temperature using acoustic waves. The highest temperature reached in Richter’s lab was 100,000 kelvin at most – nowhere near the many millions required. The experiments “could not show in any way that a controlled thermonuclear reaction has been achieved”. The sceptics were right. Richter would never admit it, but his “breakthrough” was a $300 million turkey.
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It was a blow to Perón, and a huge political embarrassment. Having promised his citizens energy in bottles, he had given them snake oil instead. Damage limitation was suddenly the priority, but this cat was too big for any bag. In December 1952, The New York Times opened an article with: “ has exploded with the force of a bursting soap bubble…” Yet despite the fiasco he had created, Richter and his wife were allowed to move to the outskirts of Buenos Aires and live a quiet life – until 1954, when an opposition member of parliament questioned the so-called Huemul Project. Richter insisted his work was legitimate and demanded to give his side of the story, but Perón’s government, fearing further embarrassment, charged him with contempt of Congress and put him in a cell for five days. He was released to live out his days in obscurity, and died in 1991.
After Richter was exposed, Balseiro moved fast – with Argentina’s scientific community behind him – to convince the government that the best way to avoid future embarrassment was to continue investing in research. In 1955, a physics institute was created, repurposing equipment from the Huemul Project, and was affiliated with the Atomic Centre established in Bariloche in 1951 on the back of the fusion experiment.
Today, the research centre’s spin-off company, , collaborates on nuclear energy projects in Latin America, Australia and the Middle East, and develops satellites with NASA. Some 65 years after Richter’s experiment ruined Argentina’s scientific credibility, the country has a reputation for high-quality research.
The hunt for controlled nuclear fusion continues. Finding a way to contain and sustain that searing plasma remains the goal of several projects, including ITER, an international reactor project based in France.
Although Richter’s experiment failed spectacularly, it remains a mystery whether he was a fraud or simply detached from reality, says Mario Mariscotti, author of The Secret of Huemul Island. Edward Teller, dubbed the father of the hydrogen bomb, summed up the difficulty in defining Richter. “Reading one line [of Richter’s] one has to think he’s a genius. Reading the next line, one realises he’s crazy.”
This article appeared in print under the headline “I’ll give you nuclear fusion in a bottle”
