Peron's fusion flameout
An Impostor Took Him For A Costly Ride
In his laboratory, Richter was ready with a demonstration. According to Mariscotti, he urged his visitor to lie on the floor for safety, fired up the arc, and opened the hydrogen valves. The blast tore off the lab door. The official was no scientist, but he suspected he had witnessed nothing more than an ordinary explosion--hydrogen, after all, is highly combustible. He hurried back to Buenos Aires to begin the delicate job of talking Peron into investigating his protege.
Final exam. Finally, in September, 1952, a delegation of scientists stepped onto the dock in Huemul. Richter staged a more elaborate demonstration for them. This time, he added lithium to the hydrogen, perhaps because it turned the flames a lurid red. A loudspeaker emitted a shriek, and the instrument needles danced. But the scientists' own instruments showed that Richter's Geiger counters were being thrown off by the arc's electric field, and there was no trace of the radiation that nuclear reactions would produce. No wonder: Temperatures in the arc were just a few thousand degrees, far short of the tens of millions needed for fusion.
Their report was unequivocal and damning. Richter was removed from his island. His massive labs crumbled, and he lived out his days quietly in the Buenos Aires suburbs.
But Mariscotti recalls that, interviewed nearly 30 years later, Richter was "without any doubt at all" that he knew the secret of controlled fusion. He seemed willing to lie about his progress and stage bogus experiments to keep his project going, but Mariscotti thinks he truly believed he could succeed. Another Argentine physicist, Daniel Bes, agrees that Richter wanted more than just to line his pockets. "He led a rather poor life afterward," Bes notes. "If he had commanded for himself a percentage of what was spent [on the project], he would have been very rich."
Since then, the same hopes of scientific glory and limitless energy have driven legions of genuine scientists around the world, Richter's unlikely heirs. In a 1988 interview, Lyman Spitzer, a Princeton University physicist who led the pioneering U.S. fusion effort, traced it all to that day in 1951. "Dad phoned me and said, `I see from the New York Times that the Argentines have beaten you to the punch.' . . . I was very surprised and, frankly, rather skeptical." But Spitzer said the news inspired him to think about how it might really be done. He came up with a basic concept for a fusion reactor that scientists are pursuing to this day.
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