Alvin M. Weinberg

Alvin M. Weinberg was an American nuclear engineer and physicist who helped shape the design of civilian nuclear power. As a wartime member of the Manhattan Project's Metallurgical Laboratory, he co-invented the pressurized water reactor concept with Eugene Wigner, a design that became the basis for the majority of the world's commercial nuclear power plants and for U.S. Navy submarine propulsion reactors, and as longtime director of Oak Ridge National Laboratory he championed reactor safety research and explored inherently safer molten-salt reactor designs. He was an early and persistent advocate for nuclear power as a large-scale alternative to fossil fuels.