Alvin M. Weinberg. Image credit: ORNL
When we at ORNL consider the value of leadership, we hold Alvin Weinberg, the lab’s longest serving director, in particularly high regard.
Oak Ridge wasn't much to look at when Weinberg arrived as a scientist in 1945. Hastily erected to support the Manhattan Project's mission to create the world's first nuclear weapons, the town was all muddy roads and temporary housing. But like other self-proclaimed Oak Ridgers, Weinberg stayed to see what the lab—and the community—could become.
As Weinberg expressed in his book The First Nuclear Era: The Life and Times of a Technological Fixer, the function of management is “first, to maintain standards, and, second, to show that it cares.” He soon got the opportunity to put this philosophy into practice, becoming director of the lab's Physics Division in 1946 and associate director of the lab two years later.
In the years following World War II, ORNL's future was very much in doubt. The Atomic Energy Commission had decided late in 1947 that nuclear reactor development would be consolidated at Argonne National Laboratory, successor to the University of Chicago's Metallurgical Laboratory and home of the world's first nuclear reactor. As a result, Oak Ridge’s ongoing mission was unclear.
Weinberg carved out that mission in a 1948 agreement with Argonne's director, Walter Zinn. Argonne would continue its work developing power reactors while the Oak Ridge site—dubbed Oak Ridge National Laboratory earlier that year—would take on more exotic test and research reactors.
During Weinberg’s time at ORNL—including his tenure as director from 1955 to 1973—the lab would build 12 research and test reactors, in addition to the Graphite Reactor built during the war. Weinberg pursued the idea of a reactor that would power aircraft engines, not because he thought the idea was feasible—he in fact called the concept a "contradiction in terms"—but because it represented an opportunity. The Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion project would lead to one of the world's first molten salt reactors, a concept that has attracted renewed interest in recent years.
Weinberg would also shepherd the lab through a major realignment of ORNL's core capabilities, launching a process that would expand the lab’s research portfolio and make it the most diverse of America's national laboratories, with leadership today in supercomputing, neutron science, advanced manufacturing, clean energy research and a host of other areas in addition to our ongoing missions in nuclear science and technology.
In his illustrious career, Weinberg served on the President's Science Advisory Committee for both the Eisenhower and Kennedy administrations. He also joined a delegation to the Soviet Union to open a dialogue between East and West on matters of science and energy.
Weinberg shared his belief in the lab's potential in an article published in The ORNL News in 1948. In it, he said:
“I firmly believe that if we persevere and if we have fortitude, Oak Ridge National Laboratory will fulfill its promise as a successful laboratory, a national institution, and a happy place in which to work.”
That belief turned out to be prescient, largely because of Weinberg's own creative leadership and steady guidance over the years. We will always owe him our gratitude.