Imagine harnessing the power of the sun using nothing more than high school science lab equipment and household ingredients. Desktop cold fusion - it would be the biggest invention of the century! Well, that's exactly what Professors Stanley Pons and Martin Fleischmann thought they’d discovered in 1989. After experimenting with a palladium cathode in a simple heavy water electrolysis cell, they observed an unexpected rise in temperature. Confusingly, they concluded the solution was nuclear fusion! (Try saying that 3 times fast)
Pons and Fleischmann were so excited that they even made an announcement to the press before having their studies peer-reviewed. Unfortunately, they didn't get the standing ovation they hoped for. On the contrary, their sensational cold fusion announcement was met with an even colder reception. The scientific community quickly doused their fusion fire, proving their 'invention of the century' to be a dud.
But this wasn’t the first nuclear fusion hoax and it wasn’t even the biggest.
Let’s go back to 1951 to a secret laboratory in a forest on an island in a lake high in the mountains. Sounds awesome already doesn’t it? It was here that Argentine dictator, Juan Perón, made the grand proclamation that his country had successfully liberated the energy of nuclear fusion. His man behind the magic was none other than Ronald Richter, a scientist with a dubious past and an even more dubious passport.
Perón gave Richter free rein to build a nuclear fusion device, with dreams of providing unlimited power (cue Perón drooling) and transforming Argentina into a world scientific leader. After his first laboratory was destroyed by a fire, Richter demanded a more protected location away from spies and potential sabotage. So the construction of a 12-metre-wide, 4-metre-thick concrete cylinder began in a location deep within the country's interior on Huemul Island - aka Project Huemul - literally plunging the nation into a brick and cement shortage!
Unfortunately, when it was complete, Richter noticed a crack on the outside which rendered the entire reactor useless and ordered for it to be torn down. Determined to soldier on, Richter began experiments in a much smaller 2-metre reactor. Lithium, hydrogen and sparks were flying everywhere and on 16 February 1951, Richter claimed he had successfully demonstrated fusion.
And what do all good scientists do once they demonstrate something for the first time? They tear down their experimental setup and refuse to replicate! Richter razed his cold(ish) fusion reactor to the ground to make yet another one.
In the end, Richter’s work was deemed as nothing short of a grand farce, but even these flops had their place in science history. They sparked a flurry of activity in the scientific community, leading to funded projects and continued research in the field of controlled fusion including the invention of the Figure 8 Stellerator (tell me that doesn’t sound like a 1950s women’s exercise device).
Whether you are right or (unequivocally) wrong, science has learned something!
SOURCES:
• El Secreto Atomico De Huemul, by Mario Mariscotti
• Proyecto Huemul: The Prank That Started It All, by Robert Arnoux
• The Cornell Cold Fusion Archive, by Bruce Lewenstein
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0:00:00 - Will: 16 February 1951. Richter claimed he had successfully demonstrated fusion. He reran the experiments for members of one of the Argentina's scientific groups yeah. Later claiming that they had witnessed the world's first thermonuclear reaction.
0:00:13 - Rod: So he claimed on their behalf, that's what they saw. Oh, no, no. That's totally what they saw. Can we talk to them?
0:00:19 - Will: No, they're busy now. It's it's worth noting, there was a technician at the site who said, look, I'm not sure, because one of the graphs was tilted. So the line that you show going up, that's because the plate was tilted.
0:00:32 - Rod: So it might not have been going I'm going to say down.
0:00:36 - Will: Rector refused to rerun the experiment. He said, no, we've got it, we've got it. This is done. We're not doing anymore.
0:00:41 - Rod: Why mess with perfection?
0:00:42 - Will: A week later, he said, pull down the reactor so that we can build a new one in its place.
0:00:46 - Rod: And that's what you do. That worked really well. Trash it straight away.
0:00:51 - Will: You never want to show this just makes sense.
0:00:54 - Rod: That's just science.
0:01:00 - Will: U 23 March 1989 was a bit of a red letter day for science communication. You see, the management at the University of Utah, I think they got a bit spooked. I think they got a little bit panicked. I think they were sitting on what they thought was the goldmine of goldmines. The discovery of the century Nobel Prizes let out the wazoo for everyone who discovered it would change the future of humanity.
0:01:22 - Rod: That's good. In a good way.
0:01:23 - Will: In a good way. And literally, if it was true, would have been absolutely not like a neutron.
0:01:29 - Rod: Bomb where, well, there's no more humans, but everything else is good.
0:01:31 - Will: No, not like that. Not like that at all. No. All positive. And they thought there would be stacks of bucks involved here, too. And so it made them make some decisions that were a little bit outside of the normal process. And so things got a little bit unorthodox, did they? The simple story is that Stanley Pons, who is the professor and chair of the Department of Chemistry there at the University of Utah I was worried that.
0:01:56 - Rod: Name might come up.
0:01:57 - Will: Yeah. But you Wait and his mate, Martin Fleischman, they've been working for a year or so on the idea that insert an element here palladium.
0:02:07 - Rod: Oh, yeah.
0:02:08 - Will: Use that as a cathode in a simple, heavy water electrolysis cell.
0:02:12 - Rod: A simple one?
0:02:13 - Will: Yeah. Okay. All I it's not a terribly complicated thing. So you've got a bucket and it's got heavy water in it rather than regular water deuterium. Nice. And then you chuck some wires in there, like a normal battery one's the positive, one's the negative.
0:02:28 - Rod: I don't literally just chuck some wires in.
0:02:30 - Will: Yeah. No. Connect them up to a battery or an electric current and you just make sure that the cathode you make it out of palladium.
0:02:36 - Rod: Yes.
0:02:36 - Will: And they reckon that can be a pathway to room temperature nuclear fusion. So that's nuclear fusion harnessing the power of the sun, like nuclear fusion, but heaps cheaper because the stuff you use for it is basically buckets in their theory.
0:02:53 - Rod: And water well deuterium. I mean, I don't have much of that lying around, do you?
0:02:58 - Will: I can get it from water, you can get it from seawater. They had this idea that, hey, we might have nuclear fusion, something that you could run in like a desktop apparatus, and the ingredients are just cheap and and free, so how hard could it be? Any country, anywhere in the world, cheap, limitless energy.
0:03:17 - Rod: Sounds awesome, but then Big Oil came in and took it away.
0:03:20 - Will: Is that what you reckon? It's exactly what anyway, so Pons and Fleischmann, they'd been conducting these electrolysis experiments in their bucket. I'm just calling it a bucket, an insulated vessel to measure the heat that is produced. Now they'd run the current through it and they're running it for multiple weeks, sort of thing, and then they're measuring the temperature. And so most of the time the temperature is not changing. It's sitting there at 30 degrees.
0:03:47 - Will: Suddenly their little bucket gets hot. Not super hot, but hot gets to 50 degrees enough that you can go from, okay, this is a lukewarm bath, to a warm bath. And they're like, but hang on, we haven't done anything different. We haven't changed the electricity going in, we haven't changed the elements going in here. All this could possibly be maybe, they said maybe magic nuclear fusion.
0:04:11 - Rod: Could it be I have to say adorable. We got a bucket of water. It's sitting in a room. Okay, sorry. Was it insulated? Wessel yeah, we put in some wires. It's 30 now. It's 50. It must be just like the heart of the sun. That's my first conclusion.
0:04:28 - Will: Looks a lot like the obviously, obviously maybe they weren't right. It's the things that happen next that turn this into an event worth talking about. So the first thing that happened was sensible. So Ponz and Fleischmann, they're applying for money to the US Department of Energy. They said, hey, we'd like to study this. And US Department of Energy says, okay, yeah, we're going to get you peer reviewed first.
0:04:52 - Will: So they sent another guy who was studying fusion, also in Utah, steve Jones from Brigham Young University. So he's doing some work as well. And he said, all right, cool, I'll do the peer review. Now he peer reviewed Ponzen Fleischmann's work, and I don't actually have what he said at this point, but at the bare minimum, he said, okay, look, this is interesting. Like whether this is the Holy Grail of we're making nuclear fusion on our desk or it's an interesting scientific thing that's worth studying, the water got warmer.
0:05:22 - Rod: That's interesting.
0:05:23 - Will: Or at least that's worth following up. That's fair. And he said to them, well, maybe we're all based in Utah. Maybe we should work together. On this. So they started sharing information in early 1989, and they met at Jones's lab in late February. And this is where I think they started to get excited, right? Or at least Ponz and Fleischmann started to get excited, because the next time they agreed to meet, which is early March, just a couple of weeks later, they brought their university presidents in.
0:05:50 - Rod: Why fuck around?
0:05:50 - Will: Yeah, they're going straight to the top. You've got to be here because this is the media, and we want Bill.
0:05:55 - Rod: Gates and another rich guy from the time and the queen.
0:05:59 - Will: Look, you can imagine these university presence like, oh, damn, this could be worth.
0:06:03 - Rod: This could be good for us.
0:06:04 - Will: Tens of dollars, maybe even a hundred. This could be I think at this point, Ponzen, Fleischmann thought they'd got the discovery of the century. Or potentially Jones was like, yeah. Nah, this could just be some interesting bit of physics. Like, this is publishable. Could be interesting. But he's not thinking. So the problem is that because Jones thought it was an interesting quirk, he wasn't too troubled talking about it. And he submitted a paper for a conference that was coming up in May.
0:06:36 - Rod: It's not quite what peer reviewers are supposed to do.
0:06:38 - Will: Well, he's putting his abstract out there for peer review.
0:06:42 - Rod: But he was the reviewer.
0:06:44 - Will: He was the initial reviewer. But after peer review, he said, let's join up. It was such a good review.
0:06:48 - Rod: He said, Let me do you guys a favor. Let me on your bandwagon.
0:06:53 - Will: And Ponz and Fleischmann are like, oh, shit. We weren't quite ready for that. We weren't quite ready to have some of these ideas talked about a little bit more public. I think they wanted to test it. They wanted to do good science. They wanted to work it out, not.
0:07:06 - Rod: To mention from the oil companies.
0:07:08 - Will: Yeah, but they were worried if it actually was and Jones got out there and scooped them, then they're like, oh, shit.
0:07:17 - Rod: There goes my infinity dollars.
0:07:19 - Will: So they agreed to submit a joint article that they would submit the joint article on the 24 March. Weirdly that they would all go to the airport at the same time to send it by FedEx to nature or something like that. It's kind of like very something going on here. Yeah, I don't know. But the University of Utah, where Ponz and Fleischmann were, they were a little bit worried about this. They were like, no, we've got to get out in front of this.
0:07:49 - Will: And so on the 23 March, they called a press conference. They said, look, rather than waiting for peer review, let's declare to the world that we've got cold fusion.
0:08:02 - Rod: Good idea. Good idea.
0:08:06 - Will: Now, that became one of the biggest stories in Science of the Year. It was a huge moment where people sitting at a desk with the variety of little apparatus there said, we can probably do fusion with high school chemistry materials and ingredients that are worth nothing. And as I said before, this would have been a huge discovery.
0:08:27 - Rod: We don't want to get scooped. So what we'll do is we'll just say we've done it in front of everyone.
0:08:33 - Will: That's it, really. We don't want to get scooped.
0:08:37 - Rod: We say we've done it first. Piss off.
0:08:39 - Will: And I love you. Can blame the university and say, oh, university management one. It's a little bit that if you don't believe it, then you go, no, this is not legit yet, or we've got to do more work anyway. So careful about getting talked into going to a press release a little bit earlier.
0:08:56 - Rod: There aren't many really kind of naughty, nasty rules in science, academia, publishing, but that's most of them.
0:09:03 - Will: It really is. It really is.
0:09:06 - Rod: Don't steal credit and don't get out before you can credibly say more than one human being's. Check this.
0:09:11 - Will: So spoiler here or not even because you're here in a second. It didn't work. Didn't like, I don't know quite what happened, but basically pretty quickly, the rest of the world or the American Physics Congress said, this is garbage balls. There's stories of like a month and a half later, the American Physical Society held a session on it. That's at their conference, so they're holding a discussion about it. At the end of the session, eight of the nine leading speakers stated that they considered the initial fleischmann and Pons claim dead. Just one person abstained. Steven E Koonin of Caltech, stood up and called the Utah Science Report the incompetence and delusion of Pons and fleischmann, which was met with a standing ovation. So pretty much that's pretty clear.
0:09:58 - Will: It did keep going. They kept doing research on it for the next couple of years. There were other conferences, so it had something.
0:10:04 - Rod: Sure, I had to keep looking.
0:10:05 - Will: But the thing that interests me is this is not the first scandal in nuclear fusion work. And it's not the first time that people have got out in front of a press conference and said, hey world, we've got some nuclear fusion. For that, for that, we need to go to a secret laboratory in a forest, on an island, in a lake high up in the mountains, and to a weirdly similar press conference this time also on the 24 March. I think the other one was 23 March.
0:10:34 - Rod: Close enough.
0:10:35 - Will: 24 March 1951, when a dictator announced to the world that the scientists in his country had successfully liberated the energy of nuclear fusion. And soon energy would be so cheap it would be sold in half liter bottles like milk. Welcome to the wholesome show.
0:10:57 - Rod: The podcast infuses the whole of Science.
0:11:00 - Will: The wholesome show is me will Grant.
0:11:03 - Rod: And me rambling Rod Lambert. Not because of the language.
0:11:06 - Will: Rambling Rod.
0:11:07 - Rod: I've been rambling four weeks in an Italian summer and I'm still yellow. Doesn't seem fair.
0:11:14 - Will: Your skin type is a nod. Tan.
0:11:16 - Rod: We are not what you call olive. We're more what you call white lobster kind of pink.
0:11:23 - Will: Juan Domingo Peron. He's like the standard guy of South American dictator. If you put them all in and you shuffle them around and you do like a machine learning thing, up pops one.
0:11:34 - Rod: Perm ola. I'm in charge.
0:11:36 - Will: Kill people who don't like he's an army careerist. He did, of course, he worked his way to the top by being in the right part of coups at the right sort of time. There's quite a tradition. You got a Roman tradition. He's been willing, as fascist dictators must, to be brutal at the right time.
0:11:54 - Rod: And also not brutal, strong.
0:11:56 - Will: Well, strong and doing super popular stuff with celebrities and things like that. He was president of Argentina after World War II, from 1946 to his overthrow in 1955. Then he came back for another stint in the 70s. Quickly, we're not looking at the 70s stint. Boring stint. During his first presidential term, he was supported by, as I said, his popular second wife, Eva duarte Evita. They did a whole bunch of stuff that was popular with the working class, invested heavily in public works, expanded social welfare, forced employers to improve working conditions.
0:12:30 - Rod: What a monster. What a monster.
0:12:33 - Will: Just remember, even evil people can do nice things on the way up. Yeah. Trade unions grew rapidly with his support, and women's suffrage was granted with Eva's influence. Of course. The whole idea of voting in a dictatorship was like, sure, you can all equally vote. Yeah, vote twice, man, whatever. Fuck it.
0:12:50 - Rod: Vote as often as you want for me. Great.
0:12:54 - Will: Yeah. Not quite full actual suffrage. No. On the other hand, of course, dissidents were fired, exiled, arrested, tortured. The press was super controlled, so it's been carefully monitored. And the other thing, of course, is that Peron had a huge ponchant of importing Nazi war criminals for his collection. Yes, he had quite a good collection.
0:13:21 - Rod: I don't have a himmler yet.
0:13:23 - Will: Of all of the collections of Nazi war criminals, I think Peron had the best.
0:13:28 - Rod: It inspired a lot of very interesting movies, though.
0:13:31 - Will: Yeah, famous ones. So Adolf Eichmann, who was one of the organizers of the Holocaust, Josef Mengele, who was evil concentration camp guy, don't need to go into these leader of Croatian nationalist movements. Basically Nazis there. They imported heaps and heaps of Nazis. Why did Peron import these Nazi walkers? You have one bit. It seems like he was actually like he thought this was humanitarian on his deathbed, sort of thing. He said in Nuremberg at the time, something was taking place that I personally considered a disgrace and an unfortunate lesson for the future of humanity.
0:14:08 - Will: I became certain that the Argentine people also considered Nuremberg process a disgrace, unworthy of the victors who behaved as if they hadn't been victorious. Now we realize that they deserve to lose the war. He's arguing that the whole Nuremberg war criminal process was that was the true.
0:14:23 - Rod: Crime of the different perspective.
0:14:25 - Will: He did think he was protecting people that were just doing their jobs.
0:14:30 - Rod: Oh, okay.
0:14:33 - Will: Yeah, that was one side. But of course the other side is that having a bunch of people who are willing to do things and use their brains for things and may have.
0:14:45 - Rod: Certain networks and resources at their disposal could be useful.
0:14:48 - Will: Yeah. So, you know, the Americans have Operation Paperclip where they brought a whole bunch.
0:14:52 - Rod: Of that's fucking Microsoft Office wasn't.
0:14:56 - Will: From no, but that's where they brought a bunch of Nazi rocket scientists in particular.
0:15:00 - Rod: I see you're trying to build a thermonuclear device. Would you like a hand with that?
0:15:03 - Will: They brought heaps over there. The Soviets had operation Osovakia vikhim. They did it in a different way, though, where they went in one night and grabbed them all and took them back to the Soviet Union.
0:15:13 - Rod: Very Soviet. Very Soviet way of doing business.
0:15:17 - Will: But there was clearly programs around the world to grab German scientists. And so what Peron was thinking here is, as well as the humanitarian thing is like, okay, these can be useful for national development. We can do some good stuff with them.
0:15:32 - Rod: Build some bomb dams and some bomb communication devices and some bomb hospitals, at.
0:15:37 - Will: Least you're saying bomb. I mean, there's the other things that they were expert in that they didn't do.
0:15:42 - Rod: Bread making.
0:15:42 - Will: Well, there's the torture and the yeah, but concentration campy stuff.
0:15:46 - Rod: Quickly move that and put it to agrarian purposes. If you want to grow wheat, what you need to grow wheat is a good torture.
0:15:53 - Will: Torture the wheat. Yeah. So there's a couple that I'll just mention. Emile Dewoitine, who moved to Argentina to work on the Pulqui jet fighter. He was a French collaborationist. There was the Luftswafe airplane designer, Kurt Tank. And then there was Ronald tank designs planes. I know, right?
0:16:14 - Rod: Come on.
0:16:15 - Will: And then Ronald Richter. Ronald Richter was born in Falkenau an der Eger, Bohemia
0:16:21 - Rod: Actual bohemian?
0:16:22 - Will: Yes, an actual bohemian.
0:16:23 - Rod: Not some bloody wannabe who eats weird things and wears a hat.
0:16:26 - Will: He went to the German University of Prague, where he graduated in 1935. Then I think he went on to do doctoral studies. But it's weird, I can't find a lot of the information here. Some people say he failed his doctoral thesis. Some people say he changed to a different topic. Other people say we're not actually sure. But we know that the university was bombed and so all the records are gone.
0:16:50 - Rod: That's what you do. I just got a professorship in Ukraine.
0:16:53 - Will: Yeah, exactly. We do know he was working on things that are not far from the sort of ideas of nuclear fusion. So electric arc furnaces looking to develop accurate methods for measurement and control of temperatures. So this is in a lab. You'd use them to heat metals up or heat materials up to get them to super heated, sort of temperatures.
0:17:15 - Rod: Cool.
0:17:16 - Will: You also use that in industrial processes?
0:17:17 - Rod: I do.
0:17:18 - Will: He discovered that the injection of heavy hydrogen deuterium would cause a nuclear reaction, which he could measure engage with Geiger counters. So he's doing some stuff in this.
0:17:27 - Rod: Shouldn't he be using the Richter scale?
0:17:29 - Will: He probably should, but he missed out on it. Doesn't count the wrong one, but, yeah.
0:17:34 - Rod: It'S named after me. This measurement is six completely irrelevant. Nothing to do with earthquakes, mate.
0:17:39 - Will: Yeah, but it's my name during World War II. It's weird. I can't find a lot of what he did. Look, theoretically, anyone working in nuclear type stuff in Germany during the war is super classified, of course.
0:17:52 - Rod: Really?
0:17:53 - Will: So there is work out there on Hitler's nuclear bomb, stuff like that.
0:17:57 - Rod: Went well.
0:17:58 - Will: But he did work with Max Steenbach and Professor Manfred von Arden, who we know did work on particle accelerators, and some of those people went on to work on the Soviet bomb afterwards. So there's clearly expertise and so he's clearly working there. There is some evidence that he wrote a letter to Central Command in Germany suggesting a type of thing that could be done in a fusion reactor or something like that.
0:18:26 - Rod: I've got an idea.
0:18:27 - Will: No, he said we could use shockwaves inside. Shockwaves with high velocity particles shot into highly compressed plasma would get you some fusion. I don't know. Don't worry about the details there. But he's suggesting stuff in the fusion sort of world, and so it suggests he probably was actually working.
0:18:47 - Rod: The cowboy days of this period would have been hilarious. It's like, okay, what's a big hot bang thing and another weird bang thing of something very hard.
0:18:54 - Will: Well, didn't you?
0:18:54 - Rod: Let's throw them together and see what happens.
0:18:56 - Will: Didn't you tell the story of the Demon Corps a while ago?
0:18:58 - Rod: I didn't.
0:18:59 - Will: Where they're keeping stuff apart with screwdrivers and things like that.
0:19:02 - Rod: Don't let these things touch, otherwise there'll be a literal nuclear detonation.
0:19:06 - Will: Look.
0:19:07 - Rod: All right, I'll put my rubber gloves on then.
0:19:09 - Will: The interesting thing here is because people working on fusion, they're typically working with much lighter elements, so there's not really any radiation going on. And the dangers are very different to working in fission, where it's uranium heavy. And literally, you can have scenarios where the experiments in Los Alamos and other places where things would actually explode in semi nuclear explosions, whereas in the fusion world, you have to generate a lot of energy and heat to hot stuff, but the stuff itself is not super dangerous. So we're talking boiling water can be very dangerous? Yes. Okay. Yeah, that's true.
0:19:43 - Rod: I mean, come on. And buckets. People choke on them all the time. You get strangled on wires. I mean, it's a nightmare.
0:19:50 - Will: Anyway, his proposal to the Central Command in Nazi Germany didn't get through. But anyway, when the war ended, it seems like Richter drifted around a little bit. He wasn't rounded up by the Soviets like his boss, von Arden, or by the Americans. We know that he spent six months working on explosives and a few commercial contracts.
0:20:11 - Rod: But in Mexico or something?
0:20:13 - Will: No, I think it could have been between London and Germany somewhere. At some point, he bumped into the Luftwaffe engineer and test pilot Kurt Tank. As I said before, the Tank guy in the planes, aren't you Kurt Tank?
0:20:27 - Rod: Let me buy you a beer.
0:20:29 - Will: Now, Tank was part of a group that was, you know, we could get to Argentina. He was talking to a bunch of other German scientists at the all. I don't necessarily know. Tank doesn't seem to have been a war criminal. I don't think Richter necessarily was. They were scientists involved in the German war machine. There was a lot that weren't involved in the concentration camp and the Holocaust. They were building planes and things like that.
0:20:54 - Rod: I'm sure it's entirely possible. Many of them didn't know what was.
0:20:56 - Will: Actually going on, but they did certainly travel under false passports and under assumed names just to keep it quiet, because people might be looking for them.
0:21:05 - Rod: I don't a little war criminal.
0:21:07 - Will: It seems like if you're not a war criminal, then you might travel under your own name. If you are, then you travel under a pseudonym.
0:21:13 - Rod: No, but I can imagine a world where they're like, look, you seemed relatively senior, and how could you not know? It's like, believe me, it was possible.
0:21:19 - Will: Look. Yeah, I don't know. Rector traveled under the name of Dr. Pedro Matthews.
0:21:24 - Rod: Always go with Pedro.
0:21:25 - Will: So on the 16 August 1948, traveling, as I said, under the name of Pedro Matthews, Richter ends up in Argentina. Eight days later, he had a meeting with Juan Peron at which he pitched to Peron the idea of a nuclear fusion device that would provide unlimited power, making Argentina a world scientific leader and purely civilian intent. Which, if you're a dictator and someone's like, I'm going to make a device for you that provides unlimited power.
0:21:54 - Rod: Hang on, I feel like I'm interested in unlimited power.
0:21:57 - Will: It's like pressing dictator be what if?
0:22:01 - Rod: Right?
0:22:03 - Will: So Peron seems to have gone all in. He's like, yes, this is what I want. This is the thing for me.
0:22:10 - Rod: You had me at unlimited power.
0:22:14 - Will: Richter was given a laboratory first at Kurt Tank's factory. So Kurt Tank had set up an aircraft factory, and he was given a laboratory there. But then there was a fire in 1949, and Richter reckons, man, that was sabotage. I need a place that is more protected and free from spies.
0:22:34 - Rod: Free from spies.
0:22:36 - Will: Initially peron is like, no, I don't know, man. So it seems like at this point, richter went and did a little bit of a tour shopping the world to say, okay, he went to Canada, he went to the US. He went to Europe. And I don't know who he was talking to, but it seems like he was at least pretending to be talking to people. So the Duran is like, come back, I'll give it all to you two. Know, there's stories of a strange Austrian with an Argentine visa in cities around the world demonstrating supposed thermonuclear devices that he's got are there.
0:23:08 - Will: Well, there are stories.
0:23:10 - Rod: This reminds me of the time I was in a bar and this Austrian called himself Pedro.
0:23:15 - Will: Yeah.
0:23:16 - Rod: And he had a small thermonuclear device with him. He said it was for peaceful purposes and it would be unlimited.
0:23:21 - Will: Unlimited power, man.
0:23:22 - Rod: And he said, Do I want it if I bought him a six pack?
0:23:24 - Will: But you can just imagine how again, this is triggering Peron. He's like, I'm so close to unlimited power. He's shopping it around someone else.
0:23:32 - Rod: Oh, yeah, he's totally tickling the beanbag of the guy in the perfect way.
0:23:36 - Will: So, all right, Peron is like, all right, you got me, you got me. He gave his top colonel colonel Gonzalez. So you're going to be the colonel that's going to help Richters to build this.
0:23:45 - Rod: It's always a fucking colonel, too.
0:23:47 - Will: That's the right rank to give someone.
0:23:48 - Rod: But they're just all colonels. There's something about the rank of colonel in all places that are predisposed to some kind of overthrow. Never trust a colonel.
0:23:55 - Will: Any other rank, it's the middle management. It's close enough to the top, close enough to the bottom that you can get shit done.
0:24:01 - Rod: And, you know, they're shuffling around in the background.
0:24:02 - Will: Cooing never trust your colonel.
0:24:05 - Rod: Never trust a colonel. If I've learned anything from all of.
0:24:08 - Will: World history so Colonel Gonzalez found all right, let's find you a secret island. And eventually they're found on the edge of the Andes is it's kind of a resort town, I think. Well, there's a lake there called Nadio Hupe Lake. And on there is Huemal Island. So edge of the Andes up there, beautiful lake down here. And I think it actually looks really lovely. Looks really I bet it does. And there's a secret lake. Humel island.
0:24:34 - Will: Not sorry, secret lake, but an island that they could keep just secure for this secret plan.
0:24:40 - Rod: Disaccessible. All right.
0:24:43 - Will: Construction work began in July 1949 and supposedly led to a nationwide shortage of brick and cement. So they're building big.
0:24:52 - Rod: They're building fuck nationwide.
0:24:54 - Will: I don't know how good the Argentine economy was at producing cements and bricks at the time.
0:24:58 - Rod: Well, the Argentine builders how many bricks do you need for that war? I don't know. A billion.
0:25:02 - Will: Look. Well, actually, I've got some dimensions of the reactor in a bit, and it's 900 km. It's quite large.
0:25:09 - Rod: By 800 km? By 700 km.
0:25:12 - Will: Well, here we go. So there were multiple reactors that they built. All right, so the first reactor that they built, and it took them about nine months, I think. And Richter noticed the construction quality wasn't perfect because he noticed not enough bricks that they'd made a twelve meter wide concrete cylinder. So that's the width. I don't have the height, but I think it's quite big with four meter thick walls out of cement and bricks.
0:25:38 - Rod: Damn.
0:25:39 - Will: But they'd forgotten to drill any access pathways, so they had to drill through because he's going to be pumping in deuterium and hydrogen and stuff like that.
0:25:48 - Rod: Here's your cylinder. How do I get into it? You didn't specify that it's closed. Said you wanted a cylinder.
0:25:53 - Will: They got to drill through 4 meters of concrete to be able to get into this thing.
0:25:57 - Rod: Christ.
0:25:58 - Will: And then they realized that that one was cracked. Wonder why. Exactly. So they had to tear that one down and start it all over again.
0:26:06 - Rod: Need a guy who's good at drilling into tiles because they won't crack your stuff.
0:26:09 - Will: There. You so they're building on a pretty large scale. I don't have the height of it. I think it's really quite a large anyway, Richter's like, all right, while you make me a new one of those, make me a baby one as well, with a two meter wide reactor and some holes, please. This time. This time we can measure stuff, put stuff into it. The experiments, what they were going to do in these cylinders is inject lithium and hydrogen into the cylinder and then discharge a spark. So, like, he's got the arc reactor stuff to set it on fire.
0:26:44 - Will: The cylinder was supposed to reflect the energy created by these reactions back into the chamber, and that would keep the reaction going. So this is a lot like actually, current fusion is based on similar sorts of ideas. You have a container, you have the explosions, and what you got to do is try and keep the container well, keep the explosion contained in a small.
0:27:03 - Rod: Enough world, hence the word container.
0:27:05 - Will: Yeah, he had bricks, but then he also this is weird. I found some evidence saying this, but it's hard to find loudspeakers sound waves. Sound waves. So inside his concrete and some kick.
0:27:20 - Rod: Ass JBLs with an Alpine subwoofer and boom.
0:27:24 - Will: Apparently loudspeakers were focused at the blast area to try and keep it contained in the middle so that then you could test if the fusion was going.
0:27:33 - Rod: And it was playing Wagner. Of course it was Wagner.
0:27:39 - Will: You know, that that would feel so good.
0:27:43 - Rod: Nothing's going anywhere.
0:27:45 - Will: Has to be to overcome that problem, using ion acoustic heating by surrounding an arc with many powerful loudspeakers that focused intense sound waves on the arc. So I'm like, oh, God.
0:27:59 - Rod: Too bad it's a pre metal day.
0:28:01 - Will: I know. So diagnostic measurements were provided by taking photographs of the spectrum of the explosion and using Doppler widening to measure the temperature of the resulting reaction. So you can see how hot it's getting. Not a thermometer no no hole for it. And then 16 February 1951, Richter claimed, and this, I believe, went first to the colonel and then up to the general, isimo once.
0:28:28 - Rod: It hit the colonel.
0:28:28 - Will: He had successfully demonstrated fusion. He reran the experiments for members of one of the Argentina's scientific groups, later claiming that they had witnessed the world's first thermonuclear reaction.
0:28:38 - Rod: So he claimed on their behalf that's what they no no, that's highly what they saw. Can we talk to them?
0:28:44 - Will: No, they're busy now. It's worth noting there was a technician at the site who said, look, I'm not sure because one of the graphs was the machine was tilted. So the line that you show going up, that's because the plate was tilted.
0:28:58 - Rod: So it might not have been might have been going I'm going to say down.
0:29:02 - Will: Rector refused to rerun the experiment. He said, no, we've got it. We've got it. This is done. We're not doing anymore.
0:29:07 - Rod: In fact, why mess with perfection?
0:29:08 - Will: A week later he said, pull down the reactor so that we can build a new one in its place. But we've done it. Let's not you.
0:29:15 - Rod: And that's what you do. That worked really well. Trash it straight away.
0:29:19 - Will: You never want to show this.
0:29:20 - Rod: Fuck it off. Make it 80 times bigger and better.
0:29:23 - Will: Yeah, look, they were going to build a new giant reactor.
0:29:26 - Rod: And definitely don't do that on another spot. Definitely destroy the original one. That just makes sense. That's just science.
0:29:32 - Will: And how does the dictator go?
0:29:34 - Rod: Yes.
0:29:34 - Will: Well, 24 March 1, peron and this is the conference. I said it's weirdly. Like 24 March 1951, he held a press conference and he says, on February 16, 1951. So a week and a half earlier, in the atomic energy pilot plant on Huemal island, thermonuclear experiments were carried out under conditions of control on a technical scale. Argentina has successfully produced the controlled liberation of atomic energy, not through uranium fuel, but rather through the simplest and lightest of all elements, hydrogen.
0:30:07 - Will: It would be transcendental for the future of life and would bring a greatness which today we cannot imagine.
0:30:15 - Rod: Most of that's not untrue.
0:30:19 - Will: What Peron is saying is entirely true.
0:30:23 - Rod: So, like, if time travel worked, right.
0:30:25 - Will: Well, look, if Richter had been honest about this, then all good.
0:30:32 - Rod: He was right.
0:30:34 - Will: So it went around the yeah. This is the point where Peron said energy would be bought. I don't understand this bit. He said that energy would be solved in Argentina. Around the world, they'd build nuclear power plants across the country. Fusion power plants across the country. Energy would be bought and sold in containers the size of a milk bottle. I'm not sure how that works.
0:30:54 - Rod: I don't think he was either.
0:30:56 - Will: I think when he said, like, he understood fusion, I don't think he understood.
0:31:00 - Rod: How much do I want a liter of energy? Of energy.
0:31:03 - Will: But also energy is bought and sold in containers like milk bottles. It's called petrol fuel. We do that. I think what he's saying is maybe everyone's going to have like a deuterium reactor and you just buy a canister.
0:31:17 - Rod: Of Back to the Future when you just put the banana skins in.
0:31:20 - Will: Yeah. Or something like that. It's weird.
0:31:22 - Rod: Fusion 9000.
0:31:24 - Will: The next day, Richter went and had a press conference as well. We spoke heaps and heaps. It was called the 10,000 word interview. So went from that's long? Yeah, it was only his words and basically didn't give any details on the experiment. No. Said what the fuel was hydrogen. He used the Doppler effect to measure speeds of 3300 gas in the and the fuel was either lithium hydrogel or deuterium. And he said, look, it's small scale, but he said, this is it. This is fusion.
0:31:58 - Will: And on the 7 April, Peron gave Richter the gold peronista party medal, which is hell yeah, the best medal you can.
0:32:06 - Rod: I know, Peronista. That sounds like a delicious drink.
0:32:09 - Will: So headlines went around the world, so New York Times ran a piece. We get places all over the world saying, okay, fusion's been achieved, but it's in a weird secret laboratory down in.
0:32:19 - Rod: Argentina, in a country you wouldn't expect.
0:32:22 - Will: Exactly. Argentina was not exactly world leader in.
0:32:25 - Rod: Science at the time, not a technical powerhouse.
0:32:29 - Will: So there's a discussion of the Bulletin of Atomic Scientists not long after, and they said, look, there's not a lot of details here. We need more details. American physicists were universally dismissive. So there's people like George Gamau, who said it seemed to be 95% pure propaganda. Four and three quarters percent, thermonuclear reactions on a very small scale. So they're like, maybe something's going on here.
0:32:51 - Rod: So he's giving away a lot.
0:32:52 - Will: And the remaining quarter percent probably something better. So it's like, okay, there is a chance that something weird's going here.
0:32:58 - Rod: Zero point 25%.
0:32:59 - Will: Edward Lawrence. There is a tendency to laugh it off as being a lot of hot air or something. Well, it may be, but we don't know all, and we should make every effort to find out. Edward Teller said, reading one line, one has to think he's a genius. Reading the next line, one realizes he's crazy.
0:33:13 - Rod: And like in a 10,000 word interview, if the first line is good and the rest aren't, the weight of evidence is pretty strong in one direction.
0:33:20 - Will: It's interesting. Look, lack of details.
0:33:24 - Rod: The bottom line for me is it's lack of details. Therefore what you say is, and it's.
0:33:28 - Will: Not yet it's again not published journals exist at this time. Absolutely. And having the dictator president coming out and saying, we've got it, that is not the same as peer review.
0:33:38 - Rod: It's really not even the same as sharing a list of the things you did at all, even without peer review. Here's exactly how he did it.
0:33:44 - Will: Here's one. Perhaps the most biting criticism came from Richter's old boss, Manfred von Arden, who was the German guy that he was working with during the war, potentially working on German fusion. He went to the Soviet plan to build the atomic bomb. People should ignore Richter's claims, noting that he'd worked with Richter during the war and said he confused fantasy with reality. Weirdly. I was reading about that von Arden guy, and he know he helped build the Soviet bomb. He was working on the German nuclear program.
0:34:16 - Will: Did a lot of electrochemical stuff, weird things like that. And then the next line said, he's considered one of the key inventors of the television. And I'm like, is he? What the hell?
0:34:26 - Rod: What the hell by who? Peron. That's another thing. My boss, he helped invent television, so we can talk about this discovery on the TV. It's all coming together, boss. Fucking clowns.
0:34:43 - Will: So Argentine physicists were pretty critical of the announcement, and Perron had a really hostile relationship with all of the scientists.
0:34:49 - Rod: Imagine. Imagine a brutal dictator having a hostile relationship with people who think and learn and prove shit.
0:34:55 - Will: So Colonel Gonzalez was also growing pretty frustrated with Richter. I don't know what about, but by February 1952, so this is nine months later said, okay, either Richter goes, or he did. And so Peron fired Gonzalez. Of course he did, because where's he.
0:35:10 - Rod: Going to get another colonel?
0:35:12 - Will: Exactly. And replaced him with a Navy captain, pedro Irolagitio, colonel equivalent. He began to protest as well. And at that point, Peron's like, all right, you're losing all of your AIDS. What's going on here?
0:35:25 - Rod: Something about colonels. I'm telling you, navy captain's a colonel.
0:35:28 - Will: He's like, we got to do an investigation. And this is the thing I love this. Peron put together a team consisting of the Navy officer Iraloguitia, a priest, two engineers, and one physicist. I've heard this joke to go and check out this reactor and see what's going on. I don't know why the priest is.
0:35:45 - Rod: Going, you need spiritual guidance. You need morality.
0:35:48 - Will: The team went down there for a series of visits between in September 1952, and they sent their report to Peron, and in particular, the physicist. I don't know what the priest said, that nothing nuclear is taking place. He's putting stuff into the container, and it's setting on fire. But we're not getting any nuclear fusion, which is great.
0:36:08 - Rod: Thank you for telling me that, physicist. Now I want to hear what the priest says.
0:36:11 - Will: He's the work of the devil.
0:36:12 - Rod: Excuse me, Padre. What's your impression of the science? Yeah, exactly.
0:36:17 - Will: I don't know. Maybe it's beautiful. He's doing God's work.
0:36:19 - Rod: Thanks for your input.
0:36:20 - Will: So the physicist is like, no way. Nothing is going on here. And they reported this to Peron. And Peron is like, all right, this is no good. Peron, sent in the military, took over the secret laboratory site, and Richter was put under house arrest in Buenos Aires between 1952 and 1955. Richter was effectively under house arrest in Buenos Aires. And Peron said, I'm happy to facilitate any travel you might want to make, but if you've got to ask the dictator yourself if you can travel, I think that's you're under house arrest, but.
0:36:50 - Rod: If you want to go somewhere, sure. And by sure, I mean not well.
0:36:54 - Will: It means sure, but there are hidden strings attached. I'm not telling you what the strings are.
0:37:00 - Rod: And by strings, I mean no.
0:37:04 - Will: I don't want to ask a dictator anything. Yeah, exactly.
0:37:07 - Rod: Not for anything. How good are you? That's awesome. But could I have as soon as you start there, you're like, Damn it.
0:37:13 - Will: It'S going to cost you. It's going to cost you.
0:37:16 - Rod: Buenos Aires. I've been through there in a fleeing trip.
0:37:20 - Will: I'm sure it looks great. Of all places to be under house arrest.
0:37:22 - Rod: It looks great.
0:37:23 - Will: In 2023, for the next three years, he's under house arrest. And then in September 1955, Peron was deposed, and the new government came in and said, fucking, let's get this Richter guy. Let's put him under a proper arrest. He was accused of fraud. He spent time in jail, and it's estimated that the project probably cost something like half a billion of today dollars, us. Dollars. They spent a lot in building these reactors in this secret island, and while.
0:37:52 - Rod: In prison, he invented the victimless crime and the perfect legal system. He just doesn't have the working of the details.
0:38:00 - Will: Richter stayed in Argentina for a while, but the whole fusion project that he'd been working on was defunct. Like, the military closed it down. He wasn't getting anywhere near any science anymore. He traveled around the world for a while. He was in Libya for a while, and then he eventually lived out the rest of his life in Argentina until he was 1990.
0:38:16 - Rod: Fuck Argentina. I'm going to Libya.
0:38:18 - Will: I know.
0:38:18 - Rod: I want a more relaxed environment where I can get shit done and no one's going to get in the way.
0:38:22 - Will: Well, there was a colonel that went to the top, wasn't there? Yeah, he was.
0:38:25 - Rod: Never trust a colonel.
0:38:27 - Will: But here's the thing. Here's the thing, okay? All the scientists said, no. No fusion happened here.
0:38:34 - Rod: You're going to tell me it did?
0:38:37 - Will: No, I'm not going to say that. I'm not going to say that. It doesn't look like any fusion actually happened.
0:38:41 - Rod: Yeah, you're hedging you're not not saying it.
0:38:44 - Will: It did lead directly to action in action two really interesting ways.
0:38:48 - Rod: Ponz and fleischmann. There you go.
0:38:49 - Will: No, not Ponz and fleischmann. So the press in the US. They discounted Richter's work and said, look, it's probably not true, but the government started funding two projects straight away. Afterwards, they're like, okay, put some money into fusion. So that Project Sherwood and Project Matterhorn, where they're investigating possible fusion reactors, both run by MKUltra. So, you know, I don't know. I don't know.
0:39:10 - Will: But they were like, okay, even if this isn't true, then it's worth looking at.
0:39:14 - Rod: Yeah, I agree.
0:39:15 - Will: But also, here's the one the most direct outcome of the announcement was its effect on Lyman Spitzer, an astrophysicist at Princeton. So Lyman Spitzer was about to leave for a ski trip to Aspen and his father called and said, hey, did you see the article in the New York Times about these Argentinians that have got nuclear fusion? Now Spitzer, he read the article and he said, nah, that's not going to work. They can't do that from what I can see.
0:39:41 - Will: Can't happen. But he did consider, hang on, you've got hot plasma in this thing and you're using these loudspeakers to control things. And he's like, well actually what we do need is some sort of system to control the explosion. You got to get it way hotter. You got to get it up to like ten to 100 million degrees Celsius. And he's like, you know what? We could use a magnetic bottle. We could use this is his explanation.
0:40:08 - Will: It's called a stellarator.
0:40:09 - Rod: Stellarator.
0:40:10 - Will: So what this is, is a system of magnets that will control an explosion and keep it going round, not a circle in a figure eight when he initially thought it. Yeah, but basically we use that in tokamak reactors in nuclear fusion projects now to control the explosion and keep it going down. So Spitzer invented, within a year and a half, two years later, invented the stellarator as the magnetic bottle that would be able to control a fusion reactor. And although it seems like Richter may have been a con artist, may have been a fraud, he did seem to have some good ideas here and he inspired directly to the magnetic bottle that came out.
0:40:50 - Rod: It makes immediate sense though that think about that. How do we have an object? How can we contain this thing without the thing being touched like a normal physical object?
0:40:58 - Will: Like the sun. It's like the sun magnets.
0:41:01 - Rod: And we all know at the time.
0:41:02 - Will: Or loudspeakers magnets, loudspeakers and heavy metal. It's interesting. I was reading about the Ponzen Fleischmann cold fusion case and there was an interesting point that I read by a friend of ours, Bruce Lewinstein, and he was know scientists hope that the cold fusion story is unique, like, that this is weird and different and we fucked up, but never happened again. Lewinstein is arguing. I believe the opposite is true.
0:41:29 - Will: Virtually nothing about cold fusion is new or different. Instead, the cold fusion saga simply illustrates what we already know about science, about how researchers interact with the media, with politicians, with the patent system, with each other, and with nature. We can use the history of cold fusion as a window through which to view modern science. I think the same thing applies with the Hummel project as well. That Ronald Richter.
0:41:52 - Will: He got the ear of a dictator. He used that to build something weird and weird on an island. And it probably didn't work. It's something that people want and it came close to really giving us something really quick.
0:42:05 - Rod: Yeah, if people want it enough, we're all good at that. Like, I really want this to be true, so maybe it is. It sounds science. He's going to bash things. He's got big.
0:42:13 - Will: You know what? I think there's something that's said about dictators and how credulous they must be. I get they're willing to murder everyone, so they're hyper paranoid all the time about personal threats to safety. But hearing from a scientist, hey, I can get you unlimited power. Jesus.
0:42:31 - Rod: Can I have, I don't know, half billion? And an island. I want an island. I need an island. I don't feel safe without one. But I suppose they are. If you just surround yourself with yes men or yes folk, of course you're going to go nuts. Because you don't know what's real anymore.
0:42:48 - Will: Which is why Putin now has a nuclear powered cruise missile.
0:42:51 - Rod: Of course he fucking does. And God knows what else. And that's why what is it? Twitter's. Become X. Because it'd be better than the thing that everyone's already using a lot. Let's fuck with it instead. But you get that yes bubble.
0:43:05 - Will: Yeah.
0:43:06 - Rod: You would go mad if people were afraid to tell you anything. You thought it was not possible or wrong. You're going to go nuts.
0:43:13 - Will: Totally. Totally. That's why I'm kept sad, because everyone's.
0:43:17 - Rod: Always telling you you're wrong. I know. And I never have any ideas because I don't want to risk it. So between us never going to be dictators. Maybe a cult leader. Cult leader.
0:43:26 - Will: We'll see you next week, Lester.
0:43:28 - Rod: Join the culture.
