Alvin Weinberg
The 'greatest Oak Ridger' sat for an interview in 1995 for his 80th birthday.
Alvin Weinberg becomes and octogenarian this month (April 1995). He has just recovered from a bout of bad health and sports a new pacemaker, which he invites you to feel under his chest. “It’s no big deal,” he says. Coming to his house for a birthday interview is a big deal. Dr. Weinberg sits back on his couch, places both hands on top of his head and demonstrates a mind more nimble than most at 30.
____
How do you compare the Laboratory scene today with the scene in 1945?
I stay out of Laboratory affairs, but the Laboratory’s situation today is analogous to 50 years ago — we were asking what the future would be for what was then called Clinton Laboratories. The question for the 50 years that ORNL has been in existence has always been, “What is it for and where will the money come from?”
Norris Bradbury, who was director of Los Alamos National Laboratory, used to scare the other lab directors to death by asking, “Suppose an earthquake destroyed your lab: Would it be rebuilt?” The implication was that he wasn’t sure it would be. Fifty years later, the whole question of the contract between the scientific establishment and the government is being reviewed again. The advantage today is that people are very adept at exploiting the political process and finding niches for the laboratories. I met Mr. Galvin. You couldn’t be against his report, but it didn’t address the critical issue, which was do you need 10, 12, 50 labs? To my mind that is the central question.
It was an awful error to cancel the Advanced Neutron Source — a dreadful decision. We’re going to spend $30 billion on a space station, but can’t spend a tenth of that on something of central scientific importance. Maybe it can be saved.
If you were 30 years old today, as you were at the beginning of the first nuclear era, what career directions in science would you be considering?
Originally I was a biophysicist. If I was choosing a field now it would be biology — neuroscience. I have a son, a neurophysiologist, who is following that course.
But I would ask myself if science is that comfortable a profession. It’s a much colder world today. Perhaps scientific careers will revert to the 1930s, when you didn’t have large sums of money and college professors were poor — genteel poverty, as it was called. It’s possible that that’s what scientific work will revert to, genteel poverty. I hope not. Science has to be pursued, and government must maintain a dominant role.
As ORNL director, what would you have done differently?
I don’t regret our early preoccupation with reactors, but we were a little naive. One thing I would have done differently is waste disposal — I would have stressed it on a much vaster scale, elevated it to primacy, in fact. We took it seriously, but not as seriously as we should have. I should have been pounding on the table about it like I did other things.
What about environmental restoration?
It’s nonsensical. We’ve gone crazy. One part of the nuclear energy contract is a commitment of real estate in perpetuity. There are 85 reactor sites and about 50 other sites. These sites are probably permanent. That’s the price we pay for nuclear energy and I’m prepared to pay it. We’re spending an awful lot of money unwisely. As far as the health risk goes, health studies have shown that Oak Ridge is a very healthy population. We take worse risks — we smoke and we’re fat. I think being too fat is probably our number one health problem.
An ORNL researcher is doing work that he believes indicates that the red dye in processed meats could be contributing to breast cancer.
I’m a hot dog eater myself.
How should we be preparing for the second nuclear era?
I think nuclear energy will reemerge, but we really don’ know when, and I don’t see its development as completed. Let’s take out a clean sheet of paper and design a new category of power reactors and fix the difficulties. Let’s have an inherently safe reactor. Europe’s nuclear power industry has progressed further than ours chiefly, I believe, because we have more coal to burn. But we won’t have coal forever.
Let’s take out a clean sheet of paper and design a new category of power reactors and fix the difficulties. Let’s have an inherently safe reactor.
Your colleague and mentor, Eugene Wigner, is described by contemporaries as well as in your book, The First Nuclear Era: The Life and Times of a Technological Fixer, as both very nice and very brilliant, always two steps ahead of everyone. How do you account for his brilliance?
He was smarter than anybody else! There were lots of bright people at the Lab, but no one in the same intellectual class. He had a great aptitude as an engineer as well as being a great theoretical physicist, and that’s what gave him insight into the early reactor designs that others didn’t have. He said he went to the best high school in the world — Lutheran in Budapest. A classmate of John Von Neumann, the great mathematician. Wigner was a chemical engineer and just picked physics up. My friend Fred Seitz said that Wigner once told him that he knew how to prepare every single inorganic compound that was known — amazing. ORNL was fortunate to have a director of such great genius, and he was a tremendous influence on me.
What are your proudest achievements so far as an administrator, as a scientist and as a scientific philosopher?
As administrator, it would be ORNL. It became a very viable entity, and at the outset we were unsure that it would. Another thing I’m proud of is the creation of the Solar Energy Research Institute; it’s now the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. After I left ORNL I spent a year in Washington in a White House think tank — except nobody told us what to think about. This was about the time of the first energy crisis. It was the days of Project Independence, in which President Nixon said that we must be energy self-sufficient by 1980, which was utter nonsense. But in Washington our group had the foresight to propose the establishment of a solar energy research laboratory. Not many people know that.
My career as a practicing scientist was short, but I’m most proud of the of the book I coauthored with Eugene Wigner, The Physical Theory of Nuclear Chain Reactors.
In the philosophy of scientific administration, I believe the most important thing that I did is address the question of value in science. A scientist’s fundamental concern is establishing the criteria for validity of a scientific finding. A scientific administrator’s concern, on the other hand, is to choose between two scientific activities, both of which are valid: Which is more valuable and should receive funding? This is a new philosophical question, the question of value in science. The National Science Foundation has more or less kind of accepted what I’ve written on this subject.
I spent a year in Washington in a White House think tank — except nobody told us what to think about.
Do you use computers very much? Have you “surfed the ‘Net?”
I’m too old. There’s so much information there to absorb. I wonder in an era of internet if you can have a Eugene Wigner, with his ability to concentrate on a single idea, if you’re always beset with outside ideas. Could you ever get to the true heart of the matter?
Did the late Dixy Lee Ray, as Atomic Energy Commission chairman, actually save ORNL, as she stated when she visited the Laboratory a few years ago?
In her book, Is It True What They Say About Dixy, she said that for some reason Milt Shaw and Congressman Chet Holifield despised me and were determined to shut down ORNL. That’s not quite right. Milt Shaw had a single-minded commitment to get the Clinch River Breeder Reactor built. My views were different: I favored molten salt-thorium cycle technology for its safety and didn’t believe in the liquid-metal fast breeder. My views were out of touch. About that time, in the early 1970s Senators Howard Baker and Edmund Muskie were working with me to make ORNL a national environmental laboratory. When Holifield, who had shepherded the nuclear labs since their creation, heard about it he blew his stack and quashed the plan. Rep. Holifield, however, was responsible for millions and millions of dollars in research spending. He did much for ORNL.
What Dixy meant was that they were out to get me fired, which happened, but I left at an appropriate time. I was a director at ORNL for 26 years, an awfully long time.
How do you live with the Bomb?
During the Manhattan Project I was one of those who urged that the atom bomb not be used on a populated area, but simply demonstrated. I think differently now. I believe that it did end World War II earlier and saved countless lives on both sides. was a captain on Iwo Jima and he certainly agreed with the decision. I also knew a Japanese man who said the bomb probably saved his life, as well.
There is a another, deeper question — which I call the sanctification of Hiroshima. Because of the terrible loss of life demonstrated in the two bombings, there has sprung up a tradition of nonuse since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. That awful experience put nuclear weapons on human terms that a demonstration never could. We must invest that tradition with a religious aura, which is what I mean by sanctification.
Hiroshima was a terrible event, as was the Holocaust, which is passing into Jewish tradition.
The Friendship Bell in Oak Ridge was cast in Kyoto and meant as a symbol of friendship and as a memorial to that terrible event and to the lives that were lost. It has become controversial, but I’m willing to live with that controversy. That bronze bell and its message will last for a thousand years, long after we’re gone and forgotten.
___
It’s doubtful that the designer of the government “F” houses like the one Alvin Weinberg lives in ever expected one to contain a grand piano, but one occupies a corner of his expanded living room. It’s his “pride and joy” and he offers to play a tune. Starting cold with Bach’s “Aria Fugue in G Minor,” his right hand nonetheless dances through the sixteenth notes. Then he explains that he’s beginning to dabble in jazz and demonstrates an Artie Shaw tune. Those fingers, 80 years old on April 20, 1995, are pretty nimble too. — Bill Cabage