Alvin M. Weinberg

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Alvin Weinberg on right standing next to his good friend Eugene Wigner.

Alvin Martin Weinberg (April 20, 1915 - October 18, 2006) was a nuclear physicist and administrator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL). He came to Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 1945 and remained there until his death in 2006.

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[edit] Early years in Chicago

Alvin Weinberg was born April 20, 1915 in Chicago, Illinois. He received his Ph.D. from the University of Chicago in mathematical biophysics in 1939. He then worked at the Metallurgical Laboratory at the University of Chicago until the war intervened. He then went to work at a newly formed laboratory in Oak Ridge, Tennessee.

[edit] Work at Oak Ridge

Dr. Weinberg served as director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory's Physics Division from 1945 until 1948, when he became Research Director for the laboratory. He was named director of the laboratory in 1955.[1] Weinberg often sat in the front row at ORNL division information meetings and ask the first, often a very penetrating, question after each scientific talk. For young scientists giving their first presentation, the experience could be frightening but was also exciting and stimulating. When asked how he found the time to attend every meeting, Weinberg replied jokingly, "We didn't have a DOE in those days."

Weinberg had the Materials Testing Reactor converted into a mock-up of a real reactor called the Low Intensity Test Reactor (LITR), or the "Poor Man's Pile." Experiments at the LITR led to the design of both Pressurized-Water (PWR) and Boiling-Water nuclear Reactors (BWR), which have since become the dominant reactor types in commercial nuclear power plants. Attracted to the simplicity and self controlling features of nuclear reactors with fluid fuels, such as Drs. Harold Urey and Eugene Wigner's proposed Aqueous Homogeneous Reactor, in support of the Nuclear Aircraft project in the late 1940s, Weinberg asked ORNL's reactor engineers to design a reactor using fluid fuel instead of solid fuel.[2] This Homogeneous Reactor Experiment (HRE) was affectionately dubbed "Alvin's 3P reactor" because it required a pot, a pipe, and a pump. The HRE went into operation in 1950 and at the criticality party Weinberg brought the appropriate spirits: "When piles go critical in Chicago, we celebrate with wine. When piles go critical in Tennessee, we celebrate with Jack Daniel's." The HRE operated for 105 days before it was closed down. Weinberg even hosted Senator Jack Kennedy and Senator Albert Gore, Sr. on their visit to ORNL [3]. Despite its leaks and corrosion, valuable information was still gained from operation of the HRE, and it proved a simple and safe reactor to control.

The Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion (ANP) project was ORNL's biggest program, which provided 25% of ORNL's budget[4]. The ANP project's military goal was to produce a nuclear powered aircraft (bomber) to overcome the range limitations of jet-fueled aircraft of the time. ORNL successfully built and operated a prototype of an aircraft reactor powerplant by creating the world's first molten salt fueled and cooled reactor called the ARE (Aircraft Reactor Experiment) in 1954, which set a record high temperature of operation of ~815°C (1,500°F - red heat)[5]). Because of the radiation hazard to the aircraft crews and the subsequent development of ballistic missiles, mid-air refueling, and longer range jet-fuel bombers, President Kennedy killed the military's Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion (ANP) program in June 1961[6]. This allowed ORNL to shift its focus to a civilian version of the meltdown-proof Molten Salt Reactor (MSR) from the military's "daft" idea of nuclear powered aircraft.[7]. That civilian pilot plant, the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment, set a record for continuous operation and was the first to use uranium-233 as fuel, and also used plutonium-239, as well as the normal and naturally occurring uranium-235. The MSR was known as the "chemist's reactor" because it was proposed by mainly chemists (ORNL's Ray Briant and Ed Bettis (an engineer), and NEPA's VInce Calkins)[8] and because it is a chemical solution of melted compounds (salts), containing the actinides (uranium, thorium, and/or plutonium) in a carrier salt, most often composed of beryllium (BeF2) and lithium (LiF - NOTE the Lithium is isotopically enriched in Lithium-7 to prevent excessive neutron capture or tritium production).[9] The MSR also affords the opportunity to change the chemistry of the molten salt while the reactor was operating to remove fission products (the 'nuclear ashes') and add new fuel or change the fuel, all of which is called "online processing".

Under Weinberg's tenure as director, ORNL's Biology Division grew to five times the size of the next largest division. This division was charged with understanding how ionizing radiation interacts with living things and to try and find ways to help them survive radiation damage, such as bone marrow transplants. In the 1960s Weinberg also pursued new missions for ORNL, such as using nuclear energy to desalinate seawater. He recruited Philip Hammond from Los Alamos to further this mission and in 1970 started the first big ecology project in the United States: the National Science Foundation-Research Applied to National Needs Environmental Program.

In 1958 Weinberg coauthored the first Nuclear Reactor textbook, The Physical Theory of Neutron Chain Reactors, with Nobel Laureate Eugene Wigner. He was elected president of the American Nuclear Society in 1959 and began service on President's Science Advisory Committee the following year, advising Presidents Eisenhower and Kennedy.[10] Starting in 1945 with Patent #2,736,696, Weinberg, and usually with his friend Eugene Wigner, filed numerous patents on the Light Water Reactor (LWR) technology that has become our primary nuclear reactors, the main LWR types are Pressurized Water Reactors (PWRs) and Boiling Water Reactors (BWRs), that serve in Naval propulsion and commercial nuclear power.[11] In 1965 he was appointed vice president of the Union Carbide Corporation's Nuclear Division[12]. Weinberg was fired by the Nixon Administration from ORNL in 1973 after 18 years as the lab's director because he continued to advocate increased nuclear safety and Molten Salt Reactors against the Republican Party's selected Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR) that the AEC's Director of Reactor Division, Milton Shaw, was tasked to promote.[13] Weinberg's firing effectively halted development of the MSR, as it was virtually unknown by other nuclear labs and specialists.[14] ORNL had also done the majority of research on thorium as a nuclear fuel, and thorium's use as a nuclear fuel was also diminished, although strong backing by ORNL's ORSORT (Oak Ridge School Of Reactor Technology [15]) sponsor, Admiral Rickover, along with his nuclear core designer Dr. Alvin Radkowsky successfully recorded the USA's first commercial power plant at Shippingport, Pennsylvania with thorium fuel to create the Light Water Breeder Reactor (LWBR).[16][17] LWBR technology is currently being used to destroy plutonium in proliferation resistant, recorded PWRs in Russia with the U.S. DOE's Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention program funding, and technical assistance from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL) and Thorium Power, Inc.[18][19]

[edit] Washington and ORAU

Weinberg was named director of the U.S. Office of Energy Research and Development in Washington, D.C. in 1974. The following year he founded and became the first director of Institute for Energy Analysis at Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU). This institute focused on evaluating alternatives for meeting future energy requirements. From 1976 to 1984, the Institute for Energy Analysis was a center for study of diverse issues related to carbon dioxide and global climate. Weinberg worked at ORAU until retiring to become an ORAU distinguished fellow in 1985.

[edit] Retirement

Weinberg remained active in retirement. In 1992 he was named chairman of the International Friendship Bell Committee, which arranged for the installation of a Japanese bell in Oak Ridge. He also called for strengthening of the International Atomic Energy Agency and systems to defend against nuclear weapons.

[edit] Awards

[edit] Books

  • The Physical Theory of Neutron Chain Reactors
  • Reflections on Big Science
  • The Second Nuclear Era: A New Start for Nuclear Power
  • Continuing the Nuclear Dialogue
  • Strategic Defenses and Arms Control
  • Stability and Strategic Defenses
  • Nuclear Reactions: Science and Trans-Science, 1992, Springer. ISBN 0883188619.
  • The First Nuclear Era: The Life and Times of a Technological Fixer, 1994, Springer. 324 pages. ISBN 1563963582. Weinberg's autobiography, covering the period from the early 1940s to the early 1990s.
  • Fluid Fuel Reactors, 979 pages, James A. Lane, H.G. MacPherson, Frank Maslan (1958), Addison-Wesley Publishing Company, Inc., Reading, Massachusetts, U.S.A.

[edit] See also

[edit] References

  1. ^ Richardson, Darrell. "Brilliant Scientist" Dies at 91. The Oak Ridger. 2006-10-19.
  2. ^ Page 100, "The First Nuclear Era: Life and Times of a Technological Fixer", Alvin M. Weinberg (1994)
  3. ^ https://iris.ornl.gov:443/R/TEYAVDETDKC72XITPG1XHSQUXENI2K8S9HM15A3ERH7GPUVX5P-00039?func=results-jump-full&set_entry=000002
  4. ^ Page 108, "The First Nuclear Era: Life and Times of a Technological Fixer", Alvin M. Weinberg (1994)
  5. ^ Page 673, "Fluid Fuel Reactors", James A. Lane, H.G. MacPherson, Frank Maslan (1958)
  6. ^ Page 49 (PDF Pg. 55), ORNL/M-6589, "Metals and Ceramics Division History 1946-1996", http://www.ornl.gov/~webworks/cppr/y2001/rpt/99295.pdf
  7. ^ http://www.ornl.gov/info/reporter/no83/nov06_dw.htm
  8. ^ Pages 99-101, "The First Nuclear Era", Alvin M. Weinberg (1994)
  9. ^ Pages 9-20 (PDF Pgs. 11-23), ORNL-TM-1853, "Chemical Research and Development for Molten-Salt Breeder Reactors", W.R. Grimes (June 1967), http://www.ornl.gov/info/reports/1967/3445603227176.pdf
  10. ^ http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev25-34/net525.html
  11. ^ http://www.osti.gov/accomplishments/wignerpat2.html
  12. ^ http://www.ornl.gov/info/ornlreview/rev28-1/text/wbg.htm
  13. ^ Page 198 - 200, "The First Nuclear Era: The Life and Times of a Technological Fixer", Alvin M. Weinberg (1994) AIP Press
  14. ^ http://books.google.com/books?id=otQDyt9PeswC&pg=PA198&dq=GOP+LMFBR+President+Nixon%27s
  15. ^ http://www.csm.ornl.gov/PR/NS10-18-02.html
  16. ^ http://home.earthlink.net/~bhoglund/
  17. ^ http://www.princeton.edu/~globsec/publications/pdf/7_3kasten.pdf
  18. ^ http://www.nea.fr/html/science/meetings/arwif2001/57.pdf
  19. ^ http://www.bnl.gov/est/files/pdf/FactSheetForThoriumReactors.pdf

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