https://www.iter.org/newsline/196/930
Maybe jail is what some of the fusion hucksters today deserve, too?"PROYECTO HUEMUL:" THE PRANK THAT STARTED IT ALL
In the spring of 1951, less than one decade after Enrico Fermi initiated the first self-sustained fission reaction in a stack of uranium and graphite blocks, newspapers from all over the world carried sensational news: in Argentina, thanks to a "new method" described by The New York Times as "linked to the Sun," scientists had just discovered a new way to make atom yield power.
The source of this worldwide excitement was a news conference that had been held on 24 March in Buenos Aires by Argentinian president Juan Perón. Argentina, he claimed, had successfully produced "the controlled liberation of atomic energy," not through uranium fuel, but rather through the simplest and lightest of all elements, hydrogen. The discovery, he added, was "transcendental for the future life" of his nation and would bring "a greatness which today we cannot imagine."
… snip …
Perón's claim was based on the works of an Austrian-born scientist and recent immigrant to Argentina named Ronald Richter (1909-1991). However obscure at the time, Richter had succeeded in convincing the authorities to build and fund a large fusion lab on the remote mountain lake island of Isla Huemul. … snip …
Millions of pesos were poured into the secret Proyecto Huemul (in today's euros, close to 250 million); a 40-foot high concrete bunker was built to shelter the "reactor" and in a matter of years, Richter and his small crew had their operation running. On 16 February 1951 they reported a "net positive result" for the first time: hydrogen, fed into an electric arc, had reached a temperature sufficient to produce fusion reactions, duly measured by way of a... Geiger counter.
It didn't take the international scientific community very long to dismiss the Perón-Richter claim as a total prank, the first in a long series of such unverifiable assertions and unreproducible experiments that were to punctuate the history of fusion research.
Richter was eventually jailed for having "misled" President Perón and having embarrassed him on the international scene, but the unveiling of Proyecto Huemul triggered what is now recognized as the first decisive step into serious research in controlled fusion.
I wonder what Spitzer promised to get his stellarator funded?Every fusion history book tells the story of how Lyman Spitzer, then a 36-year-old astrophysicist attached to the US "H" bomb program, received a phone call from his father telling him about the news from Argentina; how he pondered for days, while skiing in Aspen, Colorado, about the possibility of confining a hot plasma in a magnetic field; and how, eventually, he presented the newly formed US Atomic Energy Commission with a proposal to build a "magnetic bottle" within which the fire of the Sun and stars could be reproduced.
A little more than two years later, in the fall of 1953, Spitzer's "figure 8 stellarator" was ready for experiments, marking the true beginning of the long, arduous and often frustrating road that eventually led to ITER.
Wikipedia states that “Spitzer began to lobby the United States Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) for funding to develop the system. He outlined a plan involving three stages. The first would see the construction of a Model A, whose purpose was to demonstrate that a plasma could be created and that its confinement time was better than a torus. If the A model was successful, the B model would attempt to heat the plasma to fusion temperatures. This would be followed by a C model, which would attempt to actually create fusion reactions at a large scale. This entire series was expected to take about a decade.”
Wow, fusion at a large scale in just a decade! No wonder the politicos of the time jumped to fund this, given what was promised. As the wikipedia article points out, Jim Tuck, another scientist who at the same time sought funding for a pinch type fusion device from the AEC didn't get funded. He said Spitzer’s plans were “incredibly ambitious”. I guess politicos didn't want to hear that success was more than a couple terms in office away. Or maybe the politicos just didn’t like the name that Tuck chose for his effort … the “Perhapsatron” (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perhapsatron.) LOL!