On March 24, 1951 the government of Argentine president Juan Domingo Perón made the following announcement to the world:

El 16 de febrero de 1951 en la Planta Piloto de energía atómica en la isla Huemul, en San Carlos de Bariloche, se llevaron a cabo reacciones termonucleares bajo condiciones de control a escala técnica.

Translated: “On February 16, 1951, in the atomic energy Pilot Plant on Huemul Island, in San Carlos de Bariloche, thermonuclear reactions were achieved under controlled conditions on a technical scale.”

The man behind the Huemul Project was Austrian scientist Ronald Richter, whom Perón trusted more than his own Argentine scientists, and who had convinced Perón that he could develop a nuclear fusion reactor that would produce large amounts of energy cheaply. The Argentine president sunk an estimated 62 million pesos into the project, estimated to be $300 million in 2003 US dollars.

After the initial shock of the announcement, the rest of the world (scientists in particular) demanded details. As the questions began to mount, and as Richter was slow to move his project from a technical scale to an industrial scale, Perón appointed two successive committees of Argentine scientists to review Richter’s work. After both committees unanimously concluded that Richter had not achieved the conditions necessary for nuclear fusion, the Huemul Project was terminated.

The Huemul Project was not the first attempt to achieve controlled nuclear fusion for the purpose of generating energy. The idea had been percolating for about twenty years, since the discovery of nuclear fusion. Scientists involved in the Manhattan Project considered the idea, and a small group of British scientists had already quietly begun to work on a Z-pinch device in the late ’40s. Nevertheless, the announcement of the Huemul Project’s alleged success had a profound effect on nuclear fusion research, as it jump-started the United States’ fusion program, leading to Projects Matterhorn (Lyman Spitzer’s stellarator) and Sherwood (an umbrella program for several different confinement concepts). In that way, the Huemul Project had a similar effect on US fusion research as the (more successful) Sputnik 1 satellite launch later had on US aerospace research. The United States’ entry into fusion research also intensified the race for fusion power, as national reputations (primarily those of the United States, the United Kingdom, and the Soviet Union in the 1950s) were at stake. For better or for worse, that intensification has died down since Reagan and Gorbachev agreed to cooperate on nuclear fusion research at the 1985 Geneva Summit.

So, after sixty years of international research on the use of nuclear fusion as a controlled, dependable power source, are we any closer? Well, we haven’t achieved scientific break-even yet, so some would say we’re not. (That is, unless you count the Japanese JT-60 tokamak, which achieved D-D plasma conditions in 1998 that supposedly would have achieved a Q of 1.25 if the fuel had been D-T instead of D-D.) However, it doesn’t follow that just because you haven’t achieved your goal, you aren’t any closer to it. I would argue that, by any reasonable measure (e.g. the fusion triple product), we are much closer to the goal of scientific break-even now than we were in 1951. I think we’re just on the cusp of breaking that barrier wide open. On the other hand, I wouldn’t be surprised if there is still a long road ahead: reactor materials, cooling systems, energy conversion, capacitors, switches, magnets (for other confinement concepts); all these and more will probably have to be researched and tested further before a demonstration nuclear fusion electric generator can be produced. In 1951 we had no idea how long it would take us to reach that point. We still don’t really know, but I think (and hope) we’re a lot closer now.