| Alvin Martin Weinberg | |
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Alvin Weinberg (right) and Eugene Wigner.
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| Born | April 20, 1915 Chicago, Illinois |
| Died | October 18, 2006 (aged 91) Oak Ridge, Tennessee |
| Residence | Oak Ridge, Tennessee |
| Citizenship | American |
| Fields | Nuclear Physics |
| Institutions | Metallurgical Laboratory Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) U.S. Office of Energy Research and Development Oak Ridge Associated Universities (ORAU) International Atomic Energy Agency (IAEA) |
| Alma mater | University of Chicago |
| Known for | Manhattan Project Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion (ANP) Aircraft Reactor Experiment |
| Notable awards | Atoms for Peace Award (1960) Enrico Fermi Award (1980) |
Alvin Martin Weinberg (April 20, 1915 – October 18, 2006) was an American nuclear physicist who was the administrator at Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) during and after the Manhattan Project period. He came to Oak Ridge, Tennessee in 1945 and remained there until his death in 2006.
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Alvin Weinberg was born April 20, 1915 in Chicago, Illinois. He received his PhD 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.
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) - FLiBe.[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 to 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, instead of the Administration's chosen Liquid Metal Fast Breeder Reactor (LMFBR) that the AEC's Director of Reactor Division, Milton Shaw, was appointed to develop.[13] Weinberg's firing effectively halted development of the MSR, as it was virtually unknown by other nuclear labs and specialists.[14] There was a brief revival of MSR research at ORNL as part of the Carter Administration's nonproliferation interests, culminating in ORNL-TM-7207: 1980–07, "Conceptual Design Characteristics of a Denatured Molten-Salt Reactor with Once-Through Fueling", by Engel, et al. It is still considered by many, to be the "reference design" for widespread, commercial Molten Salt Reactors (MSRs).[15][16]
ORNL had also done the majority of research on thorium as a nuclear fuel in other reactors such as PWRs, so Weinberg's firing reduced thorium's nuclear fuel research. The next, and the only demonstration of thorium breeding uranium-233, was during the Carter Administration, when Admiral Rickover, along with his nuclear core designer Dr. Alvin Radkowsky's successfully replaced the enriched uranium core with a Seed and Blanket based core using thorium and U-233 in the USA's first commercial power plant at Shippingport, Pennsylvania to create the Light Water Breeder Reactor (LWBR).[17][18][19][20] Despite this successful demonstration of net breeding of U-233 fissile from thorium in 1982 in a Pressurized Water Reactor (PWR), no further research or development would be done until the 1990s.[19] In 1992, Dr. Alvin Radkowsky formed the commercial firm, Thorium Power, Inc. to further develop the LWBR's Seed and Blanket Unit (SBU) based re-coring of existing PWRs with fuels consisting of mainly thorium instead of uranium-238.[21] During the 1990s, the Clinton Administration backed Thorium Power's LWBR technology adaptation to destroy excess Russian military plutonium in proliferation resistant, recorded PWRs (VVER) in Russia with the U.S. DOE's Initiatives for Proliferation Prevention program funding, and oversight from Brookhaven National Laboratory (BNL).[22][23] The Russian-USA cooperative venture for peaceful uses of nuclear power, and therefore the Thorium Power, Inc. (now Lightbridge Corporation[21]) program to destroy excess Russian military plutonium in the SBU cored VVER was stopped by the Bush Administration in 2008 after the Russian invasion of Georgia. (US-Russian 123 Agreement was withdrawn from Congress' consideration in 2008)[24][25]
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.
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.[26]