My story: Abraham Weitzberg, ANS member since 1962
. . . and today.
Weitzberg then. . .
My first exposure to nuclear engineering was in 1956–57 when I was a fourth-year chemical engineering undergraduate at MIT. The previous summer, I worked at an oil refinery in New Jersey and our class visited a Monsanto sulfuric acid factory in Boston Harbor. I lost my enthusiasm for chemical engineering and decided to take a couple of introductory nuclear engineering courses as a senior. After a summer job at Y-12 in Oak Ridge, I started on a nuclear engineering master’s degree program. (An Atomic Energy Commission fellowship certainly helped my decision.)
The following summer, I performed reactor physics experiments at Brookhaven with Herb Kouts, Joe Hendrie, Rudy Sher, and Henry Windsor. In January 1962, after defending my Ph.D. dissertation on measuring uranium-238 capture in lattices of uranium rods in heavy water, I headed to Los Angeles to work on SNAP reactors for Atomics International. There, I performed critical experiments and managed their aerospace safety program.
One of my more significant contributions was the identification of the poison sleeve ejection technique used to initiate the 1964 SNAPTRAN-3 destructive transient at the National Reactor Testing Station (NRTS) in Idaho. SNAPTRAN-3 measured the effects of immersing an unreflected SNAP2/10A core in a tank of water, simulating a launch accident. There have not been too many people who were tasked to deliberately blow up a nuclear reactor.
The SNAPTRAN-1 test was conducted the previous year at NRTS. It measured reactor kinetics parameters using a SNAP 2/10A reactor with modified rapidly moving control drums, all encased in an electrically heated oven. There was no SNAPTRAN-2 test, despite some documents referring to it. One winter day when I arrived at work in Canoga Park, I was informed that the initial fuel loading of SNAPTRAN-1 was happening the next day and I had to be there. I went home, packed my clothes, loaded my skis on the back of my TR-3, and started the 985-mile drive to Idaho Falls. I arrived the next morning after a short nap by the side of the road in American Falls, only to learn that the loading was delayed. The SNAPTRAN work was very interesting, working with the Phillips Petroleum test engineers at Test Area North and the Edgerton, Germeshausen, and Grier instrumentation experts from the weapons testing program at the Nevada Test Site at Las Vegas. I saw the remains of the SL-1 reactor at the Test Area North hot cells and learned about the very fast photography and first surface movement measurements made during weapons tests.
In 1965, I moved to GE, with a one-year assignment to be the on-site representative at the NRTS for the Southwest Experimental Fast Oxide Reactor (SEFOR) critical experiments at ZPR-3. SEFOR was designed to demonstrate the U-238 Doppler effect in a fast reactor. In 1966, I presented a paper, “Measurement of Epithermal Spectra in Fast Assemblies Using Resonance Sandwich Detectors,” at the International Conference on Fast Critical Experiments and Their Analysis, which was held at Argonne National Laboratory. The detectors were irradiated in the SEFOR critical experiment. I placed the foils in a small lead pig and immediately drove to the Idaho Falls Airport, where I boarded a Western Airlines flight to the Bay Area. At the time, the only requirement was to inform the captain that I was carrying radioactive material, and I placed the pig under my seat. We analyzed the foils at GE Vallecitos.
In 1966, I moved to work at GE Vallecitos, where I performed nuclear experiments, including radiography, activation analysis, material irradiation, and critical experiments for the use of gadolinia in BWR fuel. I ended my hands-on experimental career with a transfer to GE Nuclear Energy headquarters in San Jose, Calif., where I developed the nuclear core design methods that would be benchmarked using the data I had measured. I managed the nuclear methods subsection for a few years. I was an NQA-1 auditor and worked on an advanced boiling water reactors 50 years ago.
One interesting event occurred in 1971 during the first full-core loading using gadolinia instead of boron carbide burnable curtains in the Dresden-2 reactor. We had neglected to inform the operators of the differences in the reactivity effects during the startup heating because of the Doppler broadening of the gadolinium resonances. When control rods were pulled at startup to increase reactivity and power in a BWR using curtains, the power monotonically increased. With gadolinia fuel, the power unexpectedly decreased a little after an initial increase following a rod pull. We got an urgent phone call and the issue was quickly resolved.
In 1977, I moved to the D.C. area to provide technical support to the Department of Energy. This was the start of programmatic and technical support activities that continue to this day. I worked for several consulting firms until 2002, when I started working as an independent consultant. I first coordinated the support effort for the Nonproliferation Alternative Systems Assessment Program (NASAP) for three years. In 1980, I started supporting the Office of Space and Defense, with initial work on the safety and reliability of radioisotope thermoelectric generators.
I then moved into the space reactor area that included all of the DOE joint surface power and propulsion programs with NASA, the U.S. Air Force, and the Department of Defense, where I continued until 2017. This included major programs such as SP-100 and Prometheus. I also supported the stable and radioactive Isotope Program for 15 years.
In addition to my DOE work, I performed consulting tasks for other clients, including NASA, the Electric Power Research Institute, the Nuclear Regulatory Commission, and utilities. These reactor-related activities covered the spectrum from conceptual design to deactivation and decommissioning, safety and regulation, and environmental impacts.
I joined ANS in 1962 and over the years have attended national and topical meetings for committee meetings, presenting papers and participating in panel discussions. My principal ANS activity has been in the reactor physics standards area. I started as a working group chair in the late ’60s and subsequently moved up to chairing the ANS-19 Reactor Physics Standards committee and am to this day a member. I also am on the ANS-1 Conduct of Critical Experiments committee. I was vice chair of Consensus Committee N17, Research Reactors, Reactor Physics, Radiation Shielding, and Computational Methods, and the more recent Safety and Radiological Analyses Consensus Committee (SRACC), on which I also continue to serve as a member. My most recent standards activity was cochairing the working group for ANS-19.13-2024, Initial Fuel Loading and Startup Physics Tests for First-of-a-Kind Advanced Reactors.
As we seem to be on the verge of another nuclear “renaissance,” I think back on my decades in the nuclear industry. I have seen the early growth where power reactors slowly increased in size based on operating experience and economy of scale. I saw the devastating effect of the Three Mile Island accident on public perception and the industry, even though there were no injuries or health effects from radioactive emissions.
I now see a proliferation of advanced reactors being designed, developed, and marketed—many by organizations that have never built or operated a nuclear reactor. There is also a very limited infrastructure available to determine the nuclear characteristics of the reactors prior to their deployment. The small modular reactors and microreactors are supposed to be very safe, but do the plans for near-term deployment, factory fabrication, and fueling of fleets of microreactors provide time to assure safe and reliable operation for the promised lifetimes?
It is being claimed that NRC regulation is hindering the development of new reactors, but it is that regulation that has yielded the perfect U.S. safety record to date. The antinukes are still with us, and public perception is fickle. I am concerned that shortcuts taken prior to reactor deployment might result in a reactor accident with no health effects, but with a negative effect on the industry, just like TMI.
We welcome ANS members with long careers in the community to submit their own stories so that the personal history of nuclear power can be captured. For information on submitting your stories, contact nucnews@ans.org.
