Huemul Project - The Project

The Project

During World War II German scientists under Walter Gerlach and Kurt Diebner carried out experiments to explore the possibility of inducing thermonuclear reactions in deuterium using high explosive-driven convergent shock waves, following Karl Gottfried Guderley's famous convergent shock wave solution. At the same time Richter proposed in a memorandum to German government officials the induction of nuclear fusion through shock waves by high-velocity particles shot in to a highly compressed deuterium plasma contained in an ordinary uranium vessel. The proposal was not carried through.

Recommended to Perón by Kurt Tank, Richter convinced Perón that he could produce controlled nuclear fusion using cheap materials in a process that could supply cheap energy in enormous quantities, a program that eventually became known as the Huemul Project. Perón's reasons for backing Richter were in line with the ideology of modernization underlying his concept of the "New Argentina"; he was not interested in the military applications of atomic energy but rather saw it as a way to expand iron and steel production.

Perón believed that any project undertaken by a German scientist was bound to be successful. Due to his political disagreements with true Argentine scientists of the stature of, for example, Enrique Gaviola, Perón was reluctant to seek their advice on Richter's proposal and he gave Richter an effective blank check and appointed him as his personal representative in the Bariloche area.

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

Richter's claim to have achieved fusion was wrong. It is hard at present to analyze his ideas because he never published them in the peer reviewed literature. In other failed attempts, such as the British claim that fusion had been achieved with the ZETA device, the published results could be used for further progress. The subsequent worldwide race over controlled fusion research was in part triggered by these press announcements. The generation of excess energy by controlled fusion is still an open problem.

After the announcement, and because of delays in Richter's work to pass from the 'technical scale' to the 'industrial scale', Perón appointed a technical committee which included physicist José Antonio Balseiro and engineer Mario Bancora, which was to report directly to him whether Richter's project should be discontinued. The committee analyzed Richter's work and concluded that the actual temperature reached in his experiments was far too low to produce a true thermonuclear reaction. They reported their findings to Perón in September 1952.

The government appointed physicists Richard Gans and Antonio Rodríguez to review the response by Richter to the report of the first commission. This second group of experts endorsed the findings of the first review panel and found Richter's response inadequate. In view of these findings, the Huemul 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.

The Richter affair caused substantial damage to the science and engineering sectors of Argentina's higher education system. Not only was the financial cost enormous, but Richter had never contacted any Argentinan university or admitted a single student into his facilities, making his contribution to physics in Argentina a somewhat negative one.