Alvin Weinberg. Image credit: ORNL
75 years of science and technology
It’s hard to overstate all that ORNL owes to Alvin Weinberg, its longest-serving director.
Weinberg took over the lab’s Physics Division in 1947 at a moment of great uncertainty. The Atomic Energy Commission was consolidating reactor research at Chicago’s Argonne National Laboratory, threatening ORNL’s reason for existing.
Instead of bemoaning the decision, Weinberg went into action. It is unclear whether he had the blessing of his management, but he traveled to Argonne to strike a gentleman’s agreement with then-Director Walter Zinn. Weinberg said Oak Ridge would concentrate on exotic research reactors instead of power reactor projects. Zinn let his managers in Washington know he was OK with the arrangement.
The deal was a boon for Oak Ridge, which would build 13 special-purpose research reactors in all, plus critical and subcritical assemblies.
Later that same year, Weinberg became ORNL’s research director. At the time, he told Eugene Wigner that it felt like taking care of a child he had created and brought into the world. Weinberg was named lab director in 1955, and for the next 18 years he concerned himself with the development of ORNL, the quality of its people and programs, and the evolution of its mission in response to changing national needs and concerns.
His genius was often turning iffy situations to gold. Take the Aircraft Reactor Experiment; under Weinberg’s leadership, the lab took a very odd idea and flipped it into years of groundbreaking research and development.
His 1994 autobiography is titled, “The First Nuclear Era: The Life and Times of a Technological Fixer,” an apt self-description given his record at ORNL.