by Michael Shellenberger



I am deeply honored by this special opportunity to address you all. I would like to dedicate my remarks to the atomic humanists around the world — from Taiwan and South Korea to Ohio and Pennsylvania to Germany and France — who are fighting to save the nukes.

1.

When Alvin Weinberg was 15, his family was destitute. The year was 1930. They had been hit hard by the Great Depression, and Weinberg’s father — a Russian-born tailor who never realized his dream of becoming an engineer — abandoned them.

Luckily, young Alvin was a math and chemistry prodigy. He entered the University of Chicago the following year, and over the next two decades worked alongside all the greats, including Enrico Fermi, Leo Szilard and Eugene Wigner. By the time he was 40, Weinberg had co-invented the pressurized water reactor, the boiling water reactor, the sodium fast reactor, the homogeneous reactor, the molten salt reactor, the atomic bomb — and the American Nuclear Society.

Weinberg’s enthusiasm for nuclear’s humanitarian potential was infectious, and spread to John F. Kennedy, who visited Oak Ridge National Lab with his wife, Jackie, and Senator Al Gore Sr., just months before being elected president.