On 06/22/2010 12:21 PM, [email protected] wrote: > The same things was reported by Argentina in the 1950's. The article > about this in the book Sun in a Bottle. > The inventor claims turned out to be a fake. He was using gunpowder > to initiate the reaction.
Hi, As I'm actually living near the city of Bariloche, which is on the shore of the Nahuel Huapi lake in which Huemul island(Richter's laboratory site) is, and as this can at least in a potential way be related to cold fusion, I feel compelled to tell a little story here. I haven't read all about this, but the local folklore have brought me some juicy details. Ronald Richter was an Austrian Nazi scientist which escaped from Germany at the end of second world war. He managed to convince General Peron(the Argentinian leader at the time) that he possessed the secret of controlled fusion. Peron gave him practically unlimited resources, and Richter chose Huemul island, in the Patagonia, as the site for his laboratory. I have even visited the island some time ago, where some impressive buildings, like a rectangular building with perfectly preserved 1 meter wide walls, remain. The site is now abandoned, even when it could very well be an excellent touristic destination. As far as I know, the gunpowder explosions(which could be regularly heard from Bariloche), where not to (try to) initiate the reaction, but to (either or both) scare and impress the city's residents, or demolish some constructions, as Richter was notorious for making the workers destroy what they have built previously, with the (very German) argument that it wasn't correctly built. Some parts where even manually demolished, windows where built on the 1 meter wide walls a posteriori, by manual demolition, suggesting that he was using this expensive and exhausting method to test the quality of the construction. His small laboratory suffered an attempt of demolition some decades later, by the military of the time. Although the roof fell in parts, and some walls where damaged, the (apparently pure concrete) 1 meter tick wall behind which he supposedly took cover during his experiments, remain intact to this day. In the laboratory some small pools can be seen, with some overarching metal arcs. He had two diesel powered generators, one for alternate current and the other for continuous current(!) amounting to an impressive 50kW of power generation. It seems that he even had a heavy water plant, on the other side of the small island, although I haven't seen it. After years of building, experimentation, and no results, and apparently rushed by the need of announcing some positive results, Richter told Peron that he had achieved controlled nuclear fusion in his laboratory. A press conference was called, and he traveled to Buenos Aires and made the announce publicly. After the public announce, history says that he was unable to replicate his supposedly previously obtained results. Finally an investigative commission was formed which visited the island, and the project was dismantled soon after. Part of the expensive equipments and instruments he had, which were brought mainly from Europe, were used to set up an investigative center in nuclear and atomic sciences near Bariloche, which stands to this day and is called Balseiro institute, after the leading scientist of the investigative commission. So far, so good. Although history has regarded him as a persuasive charlatan, and although that was probably the case, a small but persistent possibility remains, that he had really achieved some kind of cold fusion in his laboratory at least once. Some similarities with modern cold fusion are striking: heavy water, some form of electrolysis/electromagnetic fields, lack of reproducibility, curious or unconventional experimental setups(that was one of the commission's scientists findings which sealed the destiny of the project), are all hallmarks of recent cold fusion history, and even of its present, isn't? Mauro
