Energy of the Pampas

To the world's scientists, Argentina's new method of producing atomic energy was still "the baloney bomb." More than two weeks after Peron's triumphant announcement, no proof of real accomplishment had yet appeared. The few vague details made public were unconvincing, and Dr. Ronald Richter, just decorated by Peron for his "discovery," was unconvincing, too.

Nuclear physics is a small, tight world, but few U.S. physicists have even heard of Richter, though he is 42 years old and by his own account has been working in physics for 15 years. According to reports from Prague, Richter was a Sudetenland German who got his doctorate in 1935 from the German University of Prague. He studied under Professor Philipp G. Frank (now at Harvard), who remembers him vaguely as a so-so student. Beyond this, he left no trace in the records of science. To most physicists his claims sounded as suspicious as his credentials.

Millions of Degrees. According to Peron's high-sounding claims, Richter and his assistants "worked on the basis of thermonuclear reactions, which are identical with those whereby the sun releases atomic energy ... It was necessary to have enormous temperatures of millions of degrees ... To avoid catastrophic explosions, it was necessary to find processes whereby it would be possible to control thermonuclear reactions in a chain. That objective, almost unattainable, was reached."

The point that aroused most suspicion was the mention of "temperatures of millions of degrees." The center of an exploding atomic bomb is even hotter than that, but Richter said he used no uranium, or plutonium made from uranium--the only known means of heating appreciable quantities of matter on earth to a temperature of millions of degrees. And even if that temperature were reached, it would quickly vaporize the walls of any container. So, reasoned U.S. physicists, Richter was probably mistaken on that pivotal point.

Hot Particles. There is one other possibility. To give the temperature of a substance is merely a handy way of reporting the average velocity of its molecules or atoms. At temperatures up in the millions of degrees, atoms speed fast enough to smash other atoms, sometimes making them take part in energy-yielding "thermonuclear reactions." This is what happens in the sun.

It also happens when atoms are given electrical charges and pushed to enormous velocity by cyclotrons or other "particle accelerators." So Richter may have gotten his "high temperatures" and "thermonuclear reactions" merely by the old trick of accelerating charged particles. Just after Peron's first announcement, Richter hinted that an article by British Physicist Sir John Cockcroft told what line he was following. Cockcroft described how, in 1932, he shot protons against a lithium target and turned the lithium into helium plus energy.

Two other hints of Richter's suggest that he may have been working along the lines of the Cockcroft reaction. Richter remarked that he had bought a special photoelectric cell for his experiments. Such a cell would be useful for observing flashes of light given off by the lithium-helium reaction. Richter also said that he was using an Argentine material--and Argentina is a producer of lithium. The main defect in the method: only a few particles in a million prove effective, reducing the efficiency of such processes to the vanishing point. Proof by Isotope. The consensus last week seemed to be that Physicist Richter may well have gotten promising results on a tiny laboratory scale and jumped to the false conclusion that the Cockcroft process, or something like it, could be scaled up to full production size. But the atomic scientists, a cautious clan, were still reserving final judgment. "The proof," said Dr. James R. Arnold of Chicago's Institute for Nuclear Studies, "will come when Peron makes good his promise to distribute isotopes. If they start shipping Iodine 131 [a radioisotope] all over the world, they must have something."

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