Review of the Weinberg Years at ORNL
e asked penetrating questions and made tough requests. That's how former Laboratory staff members remembered former ORNL Director Alvin Weinberg at his 80th birthday celebration on April 20, 199
Review of the Weinberg Years at ORNL
e asked penetrating questions and made tough requests. That's how former Laboratory staff members remembered former ORNL Director Alvin Weinberg at his 80th birthday celebration on April 20, 1995. Bill Fulkerson, former ORNL associate director, called Weinberg "our spiritual leader."
In honor of the occasion, ORNL Director Alvin Trivelpiece announced the inauguration of the annual Alvin M. Weinberg Lecture Series. The first lecture, "On Plutonium" (summarized below), was presented by Wolf Häfele, scientific director of the Research Center at Rossendorf-Dresden, Germany.
Several persons recalled that Weinberg used to sit in the front row at ORNL division information meetings and ask the first question after each scientific talk--often a very penetrating question. For a young scientist giving his first information meeting presentation, the experience was frightening but also exciting and stimulating.
Trivelpiece acknowledged that he is not always able to attend information meetings and ask questions. "How did you find the time?" he asked Weinberg. The former ORNL director replied in jest, "We didn't have a DOE in those days."
Sam Beall, director of ORNL's old Reactor Division, recalled Weinberg's requests that led to the development of several new reactors and "criticality parties" when the reactors were started. "Fifty years ago, I was called to his office and asked, `Can we convert the Materials Testing Reactor mock-up to a real reactor?' He wanted something for nothing." The result was ORNL's Low Intensity Test Reactor (LITR), or the "Poor Man's Pile." Experiments at the LITR supplied data that aided the design of both pressurized-water and boiling-water nuclear reactors, the dominant reactor types in commercial nuclear power plants.
Weinberg then asked the reactor engineers to design a reactor that used fluid fuel instead of solid fuel. It was called "Alvin's 3P reactor" because it required a pot, a pipe, and a pump. The Homogeneous Reactor Experiment (HRE), as it was called, went into operation in 1950. At the criticality party, Weinberg pulled a bottle with a black label from his briefcase. Beall recalled that Alvin told him, "Sam, when piles go critical in Chicago, we celebrate with wine. When piles go critical in Tennessee, we celebrate with Jack Daniel's."
The HRE had a 105-day run and then was closed despite Weinberg's attempts to sell the merits of the reactor to powerful people in Washington. In fact, Weinberg even invited Senator Jack Kennedy and Jackie Kennedy and Senator Albert Gore, Sr., to visit the reactor. Weinberg recalled the event: "I invited John Swartout to be in charge of Jack Kennedy so I could be in charge of Jackie."
Information gained from operation of the HRE and the Aircraft Reactor Experiment (for 100 hours) led to the design and operation of the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment. It set a record for continuous operation of a reactor, and it was the first reactor to use uranium-233 as fuel.
Ellison Taylor, former director of ORNL's old Chemistry Division, said, "Reactors were the centerpiece of the Laboratory in the Weinberg era." But he called the Molten Salt Reactor Experiment "a chemist's reactor" because the "make-or-break problems" of the reactor required chemical solutions.
Howard Adler, former director of ORNL's Biology Division, recalled that under Weinberg this division was the largest, "five times the size of the next largest division." Its mission, he said, was to understand how radiation interacted with living things and to find ways to help organisms survive radiation damage, such as with bone marrow transplants.
Fulkerson remembered Weinberg as an environmentalist. "He viewed national laboratories as tools for achieving social progress." Fulkerson said that once the nuclear era was under way, Weinberg thought that ensuring sufficient food, clean water, and biological survival were important missions. Thus, in the 1960s Weinberg pursued new missions for the Laboratory, such as using nuclear energy to desalinate seawater and "make the deserts bloom." Philip Hammond was recruited to the Laboratory from Los Alamos to push this mission.
Weinberg then invited David Rose from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to come to ORNL and provoke discussion of the future of national laboratories. One result was a controversial publication "A Case for a National Environmental Laboratory." U.S. Representative Chet Holifield, chairman of the Joint Congressional Committee on Atomic Energy, opposed the idea. "Holifield," Fulkerson said, "didn't want nuclear labs tainted with the environmental brush."
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