Huemul Project

The Huemul Project (Spanish: Proyecto Huemul) was an early 1950s Argentine effort to develop a fusion power device known as the Thermotron. The concept was invented by Austrian scientist Ronald Richter, who claimed to have a design that would produce effectively unlimited power.

Richter was able to pitch the idea to President Juan Perón in 1948, and soon received funding to build an experimental site on Huemul Island, just outside the town of San Carlos de Bariloche in Patagonia near the Andes mountains. Construction began late in 1949, and by 1951 the site was completed and carrying out tests. On 16 February 1951, Richter measured high temperatures that suggested fusion had been achieved. On March 24, the day before an important international meeting of the leaders of the Americas, Perón publicly announced that Richter had been successful; adding that in the future energy would be sold in packages the size of a milk bottle and perhaps free of charge.

A worldwide interest followed, along with significant skepticism on the part of other physicists. Little information was forthcoming; no papers were published on the topic, and over the next year a number of reporters visited the site but were denied access to the buildings. After increasing pressure, Perón arranged for a team to investigate the claims and return individual reports, all of which were negative. A review of these reports was equally negative, and the project was ended in 1952.

Perón was overthrown in 1955, and in the aftermath, Richter was arrested for fraud. He appears to have spent periods of time abroad, including some time in Libya. Eventually he returned to Argentina, where he died in 1991.

According to Rainer Karlsch's Hitler's Bomb, 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 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 into a highly compressed deuterium plasma contained in an ordinary uranium vessel. The proposal was not carried through.

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