In trying to answer the persistent question about LFTRs: “why wasn’t this done before?” I’ve obtained a report from 1962 made to President Kennedy where future development options for nuclear power were laid before him. Alvin Weinberg specifically references this report in his 1994 memoir (“First Nuclear Era”) and goes on to say that it […]
I was very fortunate to meet Dr. Kazuo Furukawa in person several weeks ago, and he shared with me a fascinating talk that had somehow escaped my attempts to discover everything Alvin Weinberg said or thought or wrote down about the molten-salt reactor. The talk was called “The proto-history of the molten salt system” and […]
I should have known right from the moment I walked in the building that this was going to go well. Right inside the main door are two large statues; one of James Prescott Joule, the famous physicist and thermodynamicist, and the other of John Dalton, chemist and pioneer of atomic theory. As I walked by, […]
Not far west from the ruined community of Cefn Croes lies the Snowdonia Mountains of Wales, the site of one of the United Kingdom’s most beautiful National Parks. It was to Snowdonia in 1971 that a young Amory Lovins came at the behest of David Brower. Young Lovins, a three-time college dropout with an unearned […]
(guest post by Charles Barton) Eugene Wigner spent a brief period as Research Director of what was then called the Clinton Laboratories. Oak Ride was in 1943 a town that did not exist, so the Laboratory could not be named for it. Instead the assigned name that of Clinton, the old East Tennessee town that […]
In 1957 Alvin Weinberg presented a paper whose ostensive lead author, Raymond Clare Briant had been dead for three years. This is a procedure is science to memorialize a scientist who had made a significant contribution to a research project but who had died before the contribution could be recorded in a scientific paper. In […]
Eugene Wigner (left), Enrico Fermi (right)Some of the best scientist of the 20th century hung around around the “Metallurgical Laboratory” of the University of Chicago. The “Metallurgical Lab” was a cover for the nuclear research establishment which Author H. Compton set up at the University of Chicago during World War II. The Metallurgical Lab was […]
From Issues in Science and TechnologySummer 2003 New Life for Nuclear Powerby ALVIN M. WEINBERG Most of what I wrote in “Engineering in an Age of Anxiety” and “Energy Policy in an Age of Uncertainty” I still believe: Inherently safe nuclear energy technologies will continue to evolve; total U.S. energy output will rise more slowly […]
At the University of Tennessee (where I have been a distance student for the past three years) they regularly have webcasts of nuclear colloquia that they offer on a variety of topics. In commemoration of Dr. Weinberg I wanted to post a set of links to broadcasts of four colloquia he gave over the last […]
Alvin Weinberg passed away last night at the age of 91 at his home in Oak Ridge. He was the director of Oak Ridge National Lab from 1950 to 1970 and supervised the development and construction of two molten-salt reactors. In his book “The First Nuclear Era”, he stated that the reason he took the […]