. . . 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.