The Passion of Alvin Weinberg The Humanitarian Behind China's Great Thorium Push

The Passion of Alvin Weinberg

The Humanitarian Behind China's Great Thorium Push

When four top climate scientists released a letter last November urging the expansion of safe nuclear power to fight climate change, the world took note. But few people realize that more than 40 years previously, and a decade before James Hansen’s high-profile testimony before Congress, one of America’s leading nuclear engineers was speaking out on the looming prospect of global warming. Alvin Weinberg spent much of his early career pushing for his thorium-fueled, molten salt nuclear reactor design – much to the chagrin of the industry – but when the government abandoned it, he began to broadly advocate nuclear power as a way to provide abundant electricity for an energy-hungry world and wean the US off fossil fuels. It took 40 years, but a new generation of engineers concerned about climate change is rediscovering Weinberg and his design. That the Chinese government has invested $350 million in a new molten-salt project shows just how significant Weinberg’s impact has been on the broader development of nuclear.

http://thebreakthrough.org/index.php/programs/energy-and-climate/the-passion-of-alvin-weinberg