Sun in a Bottle (11 page)

All in all, Project No. 7 consisted of 122 nuclear explosions between 1965 and 1988. Their results were mixed at best. Hydrogen bombs, it turned out, did not give humanity the power to move mountains or to reshape the landscape to suit its fancy. What they provided was a far cry from a fusion-crafted utopia.

Fusion bombs were just that—bombs. They were swords too crude to be shaped into plowshares, unable to benefit humanity in any tangible way. Scientists would have to come up with entirely new ideas if they wanted to harness the power of the sun without getting burned.

Among other bodies which the alchemists of the middle ages thought it possible to discover, and accordingly sought after, was a Universal Solvent, or
Alkahest
as they named it. This imaginary fluid was to possess the power of dissolving any substance, whatever its nature, and to reduce all kinds of matter to the liquid form. It does not seem to have occurred to these ingenious dreamers to consider, that what dissolved everything, could be preserved in nothing.

 

 

T
he sun itself needs no bottle. It is held together by its own gravity; the mutual attraction of all its atoms is able to keep the fusion engine in its belly from blowing itself apart. But any lump of material smaller than a star does not have enough gravitational force to counteract the enormous pressure of an expanding fusion reaction. For humans to succeed in making an earthbound sun, scientists would have to figure out how to contain the fusion reaction with an external force—figure out how to bottle it up.

The Teller-Ulam design used atom bombs to create a temporary bottle. Pressure from the radiation of a fission bomb squashed the fuel from the outside; pressure from the explosion of a fission “spark plug” compressed the fuel from the inside. Caught in between these two nuclear anvils, the deuterium and tritium fuel was crushed, heated, and bottled up for a fraction of a second. The result was a brief burst of fusion energy: an exploding sun. However, the brevity and violence of the explosion made it suitable only as a weapon of war. To harness the power of fusion for peaceful purposes, scientists needed a much subtler kind of bottle.

In the early 1950s, the need was growing urgent. In the past, the United States had always produced more energy than it needed, but that trend was rapidly changing. Economists and scientists knew that by the end of the 1950s, America would have to begin importing fuel—oil—to keep its economy going. In Britain, the situation was even worse; dependent on oil imports, the United Kingdom was embroiled in a spat with its main supplier, Iran.
³⁰
The West was getting its first taste of oil addiction, and it wasn’t pleasant. Fusion energy—if scientists could design a bottle to contain it—could prevent a future where the Western world was kept hostage to a dwindling and increasingly expensive supply of foreign oil.

On March 25, 1951, Argentina announced that it had designed such a bottle. Argentina’s scientists were claiming they had solved humanity’s energy problems. It was a few days before the Greenhouse tests, and Ivy Mike was months away. The United States had not yet liberated fusion energy, but Argentina’s president, Juan Perón, was gleefully bragging about having generated “thermonuclear reactions” and harnessing the power of the sun.

The
New York Times
reported the claim on page 1: “The project is still in the early stages, but when Argentina is able to produce as much energy as deemed necessary, all will be used solely for industry, President Perón declared.” Not only was Perón willing to forswear his bomb-making ambitions, but he couldn’t resist tweaking the scientists in the United States and the USSR who were trying to turn fusion energy into weapons. “Foreign scientists will be interested to learn that while working on the thermonuclear reactor, the problems associated with the so called hydrogen bomb were studied in great detail, and we have been shocked to find that results published by the most reputed experts are far removed from reality,” Perón told a gaggle of Spanish-language reporters who had been summoned to a press conference at the Argentine presidential palace.

For such a dramatic claim, Perón provided very few details. The reactor used “a totally new way of obtaining atomic energy”—fusion. Experiments had been under way for some time and had yielded some very promising results, bringing matter to temperatures of “several million degrees.” This success led Perón to establish a pilot fusion energy plant to create “artificial suns on earth.” This plant was on a small island in a lake near the Chilean border: Huemul Island.

The director of the Huemul reactor was a German-speaking scientist named Ronald Richter, of whom little was known. After Perón finished speaking, Richter addressed the Spanish-speaking reporters through a translator. “What the Americans get when they explode a Hydrogen bomb, we in Argentina achieve in the laboratory and under control,” Richter said. “As of today, we know of a totally new way of obtaining atomic energy which does not use materials hitherto thought indispensable.” At the press conference and in a follow-up one the following day—no foreign press allowed—Richter spoke of controlled explosions of lithium and hydrogen and deuterium. And he claimed that he had achieved fusion at his mysterious lab on Huemul Island: “Yes, sir, for the very first time a thermonuclear reaction has been produced in a reactor.”

The statement promptly set off a firestorm. Many in the physics community quickly rejected the claim; scientists around the world scoffed at Richter. When American reporters asked David Lilienthal whether there was the “slightest chance” that Argentina had attained fusion, he answered, “Less than that.” A Brazilian scientist noted that “It is strange that the names of eminent physicists working at present in Argentina are not associated with the announced atomic project.” And when asked what material other than hydrogen Richter could be fusing, a former Manhattan Project physicist, Ralph Lapp, was quick with an answer. “I know what that other material is that the Argentines are using,” he told
Time
magazine. “It’s baloney.” (
Time
promptly dubbed Richter’s reactor the “Baloney bomb.”)

Perón bristled at the criticism. “I am not interested in what the United States or any other country in the world thinks,” he snarled, lashing out at the foreign politicians and newspapers who “lie consciously” and spread deception. “They have not yet told the first truth, while I have not yet told the first lie.”
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And even as some scientists ridiculed Perón’s claims, others began to chime in, supporting Richter’s assertions. The mystery of Huemul Island, a drama that would last for months, was getting deeper by the day. It was just beginning.

Richter’s claims marked the official beginning of a quest that had been in the planning stages for a long time—the quest to liberate the energy of fusion for the benefit of mankind. Years before scientists achieved fusion on Earth, they had realized that the uncontrolled violence of hydrogen bombs was far from an ideal way to harness the sun’s power. What physicists really wanted was a fusion reaction they could control. They wanted a reactor that produced energy by fusing hydrogen into helium, and they wanted it to be stable, unlike the dangerous evanescent explosion of a fusion weapon. To create a workable reactor that would tap the unlimited potential of fusion energy, scientists needed to build a sun in a bottle.

Soon, scientists the world over were squabbling, alternately claiming triumphs and debunking them. The Huemul drama was the first act in the quest to create a tiny, controllable fusion reaction. But it was far from the last.

At first glance, it seems impossible to make a bottle sturdy enough to contain a burning sun. What kind of material is strong enough to hold a fusion reaction? To get even the most fusion-friendly atoms to stick to one another, they have to slam together hard enough to overcome their mutual electric repulsion, so the atoms have to be extraordinarily hot—tens or hundreds of million degrees Celsius.
³²
But matter at such high temperatures is very hard to contain. It is hotter than anything on Earth, far hotter than the melting point of steel. Even a diamond vessel would instantly evaporate in temperatures that extreme. Million-degree substances act almost like universal solvents, eating through whatever substance you put them in. Nothing on Earth would be able to contain such hot matter, at least not without some extraordinarily clever tricks.

Ronald Richter did not have the credentials one would expect of someone who could come up with such a clever trick. He didn’t have a terribly strong scientific background. As a student, he apparently had tried to study (nonexistent) “delta rays” coming from the earth, but his proposal was rejected by his professors. His adviser merely remembered him as a “so-so” student. He hadn’t published any scientific papers and had scant experience in the laboratory. But when Perón suddenly announced that Richter had created a sun in a bottle, he caught the world’s attention.

In the days after Perón’s announcement in March 1951, Richter provided a few more details about his reactor, which he called the “thermotron.” He described the device as a “solar reactor furnace” and said the reactor worked by fusing deuterium with lithium—a light metal whose atoms have three protons and three or so neutrons—at 10,000 degrees Fahrenheit. This was far short of the tens of millions of degrees that fusion scientists thought were required to initiate such a reaction. Richter also said that the reactions in the thermotron created little explosions, micro-fusion-bombs, which, however, were well-contained by large stone walls that surrounded the furnace. For most scientists, this announcement only increased their skepticism. But for others, Richter’s work began to seem plausible, and they started jockeying to share in the credit for the discovery.

On April 1, the
New York Times
announced that a French physicist supported Richter’s claims. The physicist was asserting that, a few months prior, he had performed experiments whose results bore a “striking similarity” to what the Argentine scientist was seeing. In the same issue, the
Times’
s science editor, Waldemar Kaempffert, wrote that “Richter admits that his process is not new,” and the journalist listed some of his intellectual forebears: the Britons John Cockcroft and Robert Atkinson; the German Fritz Houtermans; the Russian émigré George Gamow; and, of course, Edward Teller. Kaempffert conceded that Richter might have made a breakthrough, but he rejected Perón’s comment that everyone else was on the wrong track. “American and European scientists are fully aware of the work of Atkinson, Houtermans, Gamow, and Teller,” he sniffed. If Richter had made a breakthrough, it was not Argentina’s alone. It was due, in part, to the work of American, British, and German physicists.

Later that month, Perón pinned the Peronist loyalty medal on Richter’s chest, and in May he established a national physics laboratory to exploit the discovery. The Dutch government started negotiating nuclear research deals with Argentina. The South American country was trying to become a major player in nuclear politics. At the same time, though, the criticism and scorn from foreign skeptics became increasingly caustic.
Time
magazine and other outlets picked up a rumor that Richter had been arrested. A Brazilian newspaper,
Time
reported,

 

It wasn’t true, but it amplified the claims of fraud that surrounded Richter. Also in May, the Austrian physicist Hans Thirring published an article that asked whether Richter’s scheme was “a swindle.” The answer consisted of the following possibilities:

 

Richter lashed back the next month—in the paranoid and combative style of the professional crank. “The reactor operation crew and I are deeply sorry for Herr Thirring, because he revealed himself to be a typical text book professor with a strong scientific inferiority complex, probably supported by political hatred,” he wrote. And of the reports that he had been arrested in secret? “It must really have been the deepest degree of secrecy because I only know of it through the newspapers,” Richter sneered. “I am not impressed by these well-known methods of psychological warfare.” His research would continue unabated, and he would likely have a thermonuclear reactor “in full-scale operation in about ten months or so.”

The rumors of Richter’s arrest, at least, were false, and work continued at Huemul, apparently on schedule. In October, Richter announced that a large-scale experiment had been successful. By December, he was bragging that he “would be able to make convincing new demonstrations within three months.” The Associated Press reported Richter’s claim that he was in negotiations with a “highly industrialized foreign country” to trade his nuclear secrets for money and raw materials. He added that foreign skeptics “soon would have to eat their words.”

Instead, Richter was the one who would get his comeuppance. Three months later, he failed to produce his “convincing new demonstrations,” and he became the butt of jokes in Argentina. Detractors, seeing Richter in a café with a bandage on his hand, commented snidely that the good doctor had been wounded when one of his atomic bombs exploded in his hands. In the lab, Richter’s behavior was becoming increasingly bizarre. He requested pumps to inject gunpowder into the reactor. In April 1952, Pedro Iraolagoitia, a Peronist navy pilot, visited Huemul to inspect the plant. He was shocked when Richter deliberately blew up a tank of nitrogen and hydrogen, blowing the door to the lab clean off. Weirder still, right after he triggered the explosion, Richter scuttled over to his instruments and on a piece of paper spewed out by one piece of equipment, he wrote “atomic energy.” Iraolagoitia figured that Richter was insane. Soon he had convinced Perón to launch an investigation into the Huemul project, and a group of scientists and politicians visited the island in September 1952.