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Huemul Project

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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, under certain conditions, he could produce nuclear fusion energy before any other country (at that time Argentina was among the wealthiest countries of the World), based in a Lithium-deuterium nuclear reaction. The present state of the art in fusion research is for example, the $12 billion USD ITER multinational project, which uses a tokamak-like configuration and is the result of decades of research and development, far removed from Richter's pioneering 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 "Hitler's Bomb" (DVA, Germany, 2005). In Argentina Richter experimented with the acoustic heating of high temperature arcs.

Late in 1949 construction of the laboratories in Huemul Island (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 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 triggered by this press announcement.

Soon after the announcement a group of Argentine scientists was appointed to study the merit of the project. This group, led by physicist José Antonio Balseiro, concluded that Richter's claims were impossible (but see Unsolved problems in physics). Balseiro's calculations in the view of government officials made a strong case against the suitability of this method of attaining fusion (note that Balseiro's calculations can be used against ITER too, given that both methods try to exploit the same nuclear reaction). A second independent Commission endorsed the conclusions of the first one, and the project was closed in 1952. Richter had grossly underestimated the technical difficulties of achieving controlled fusion and had erroneously interpreted the results of his experiments.

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 market locally peaceful uses of Nuclear Energy developed overseas. Argentina has now two operational Nuclear Electric power stations, one (Atucha I, 335 MWe) built by German (Siemens) and other (Embalse, 600 MWe) by Canadian (CANDU) companies. The real cost of the electricity generated by this plants is unknown. A third one (Atucha II, 692 MWe) has been delayed by financial and other problems (namely, incompetence) and recently (2003, 2006) the government announced its commitment to complete the project ($3.8 billion USD).

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 unrelated with the production of energy from nuclear forces. In partnership with its associated research center, the Centro Atómico Bariloche, and the National University of Cuyo it has trained a couple of hundred physicists and nuclear engineers and produced hundreds of peer-reviewed scientific papers as well as other important contributions to applied and basic science, as it is done in a daily basis by many other Institutions in Argentina with far much less budget. Although Power Reactors in the hundreds of Megawatt range have not been built by Argentina on its own, INVAP, a state owned company with an unknown accounting balance, started by graduates of the Instituto Balseiro in 1976 and located in Bariloche, has exported research reactors of less than a Megawatt to Peru, Algeria, Egypt and most recently to Australia, but the net income from this exports are not expected to balance nor even closely the deficit of billions of USD incurred by the nuclear business in charge of the Comisión Nacional de Energía Atómica and its partners.

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

From Physics Today

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