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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 materialand 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 Perón makes good his promise to distribute isotopes. If they start shipping Iodine 131 [a radioisotope] all over the world, they must have something."
