MILTON LEVENSON (1923-2018)

BY MARGARET CHU, CHRIS WHIPPLE, AND
ROBERT BUDNITZ¹

MILTON LEVENSON was born on Jan. 4, 1923, in St. Paul, Minnesota, to Russian immigrant parents and grew up in Northfield, Minnesota, during the Great Depression. His family was very poor; for much of his childhood, their home had no electricity or indoor plumbing. During the long Minnesota winters, it was his responsibility to wake up early, stoke the fire in the woodstove, and boil water to pour over the pump so it could function. His parents ran an auto wrecking yard, and when Milt was just 13, he used spare parts from the junkyard to assemble a car, driving it to school, where the only other person with a car was the principal.

Milt attended the University of Minnesota and majored in chemical engineering. With the onset of World War II, he graduated early, earning his bachelor’s degree in December of 1943. With a few months remaining on his student deferment, Milt began looking for a job. “I answered a blind offer,” he later recalled. “I had no idea what the job was, but it was a good offer, so I took it.”

The offer turned out to be for the Manhattan Project. Milt was hired as a junior engineer by the Houdaille-Hershey Corporation in Decatur, Illinois, to work on pilot plants for the Gaseous Diffusion Plant, which was enriching uranium-235 from natural uranium for use in the first nuclear bomb.

Not long after, however, his student deferment expired, and he was drafted into the U.S. Army as a combat engineer. He underwent crisis training in Louisiana in preparation for deployment to the Battle of the Bulge. While still in training, he received a sealed envelope from the commanding officer instructing him to return by train to Decatur. Curious about the project, he visited a technical library in Chicago and deduced that they were building a nuclear bomb. When he started questioning others about it, he was quickly reassigned to Oak Ridge, Tennessee, in late 1944.

At Oak Ridge, he joined a development group tasked with designing and constructing a small chemical isolation plant at the X-10 laboratory. Within a year, he was leading his division – as a Private – with an Army Major serving as his assistant.

After the war, Milt was offered a civilian position at Oak Ridge as superintendent of a pilot plant. During this time, he also contributed to the production of carbon-14 for radiometric dating experiments by making and irradiating beryllium nitride – at a time when beryllium was only beginning to be recognized as a hazardous material.

Oak Ridge remained a center of U.S. nuclear activity in the early postwar years. In 1948, the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) restructured the national nuclear research program, transferring all reactor-related work to Argonne National Laboratory near Chicago while keeping other nuclear research at Oak Ridge. Milt was offered a position at Argonne as a development engineer, working on projects related to reprocessing nuclear fuel and preparing nuclear waste for long-term disposal.

In the summer of 1949, Milt met Mary Novick, a chemist from Argonne’s Chemistry Division, at a company picnic. They were married in August 1950.

One of Milt’s early assignments at Argonne was to determine whether the first experimental breeder reactor in Idaho (EBR-I) was truly functioning as a breeder. To do this, he began a program using chemical techniques to measure basic physical constants, such as the ratio of parasitic captures to fission in U-235 and plutonium. These measurements helped confirm that EBR-I was indeed breeding fuel. By the mid-1950s, EBR-II, a second experimental breeder, was under construction. It included not only the reactor itself but also the full fuel cycle infrastructure. He was appointed project manager, responsible for developing the reactor’s technical basis and designing the fuel cycle facilities, with the ultimate goal of reprocessing its spent fuel.

Between 1968 and 1972, he served as director of the EBR-II project. During this time, EBR-II was converted from a power reactor prototype into an irradiation facility. In parallel, the fuel cycle facility – the first of its kind in the world – was constructed to remotely reprocess spent fuel, fabricate new fuel, and return it to the reactor. Due to high radiation levels, the entire process was conducted without human entry into the facility.

Throughout his years at Argonne, Milt also served on the laboratory’s independent safety committee. This group played a critical role because, although the AEC had a division responsible for regulating safety at its national laboratories, it relied heavily on the labs themselves to ensure safe design and operation. Committees like Argonne’s were thus vital to maintaining a strong internal culture of safety.

In 1972, Milt was appointed associate director for energy and environment at Argonne. Around the same time, the U.S. electric utility industry was forming a new research entity – the Electric Power Research Institute (EPRI). Chauncey Starr (NAE 1965), dean of engineering at the University of California, Los Angeles, was named EPRI’s first president, and in the fall of 1973, Milt joined EPRI as director of its Nuclear Division.

EPRI was established to help utilities explore new energy sources, improve energy efficiency, and develop safe, cost-effective technologies. The Nuclear Division was originally divided into three groups: Safety and Analysis, Systems and Materials, and Engineering and Operations. After the 1979 accident at Three Mile Island (TMI), Milt was tapped to lead a technical team of approximately 100 experts. The team lived on-site at TMI for several months, providing crucial technical support and guidance as both industry and government sought to understand the causes of the accident and determine the most effective recovery strategies. This effort ultimately led to the creation of EPRI’s Nuclear Safety Analysis Center, which reported directly to Milt upon his return to EPRI.

In 1981, Bechtel president Harry Reinsch offered him a position as his Executive Consultant, beginning a new chapter in his career that would last the next eight years. At Bechtel, he served on review teams for strategic decisions within Bechtel Power Management Group and played an active role in setting internal policies and standards for the design and construction of nuclear power plants. Much of his time at Bechtel was spent traveling internationally to speak about the “source term” – the quantity of radioactive materials that might escape the protective containment building of a nuclear reactor during an accident. He consistently advocated for realistic representations of nuclear accident consequences, emphasizing that these consequences were often much lower than the public feared. He also participated in numerous international activities as a member of U.S. delegations. Notably, he was part of the technical team that traveled to examine and inspect the Chernobyl reactor following the 1986 accident. In the aftermath, EPRI organized a group to derive and disseminate “lessons learned” that could improve nuclear safety worldwide, and Milt played a key role in that effort.

Milt retired in 1990 as a vice president at Bechtel, but he continued to work as a private consultant on nuclear issues. For many years, he served as a Senior Technical Advisor to the National Nuclear Security Administration (NNSA) Weapons Safety Program, reviewing safety operations at Pantex, near Amarillo, Texas, and occasionally at Los Alamos, Sandia, Livermore, and the Nevada Test Site. He also supported the Department of Energy’s R&D program to produce medical isotopes without the use of highly enriched uranium.

He was elected a fellow of the American Nuclear Society and served as its president from 1983 to 1984. He was also a fellow of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers (AIChE) and received the 1975 AIChE Robert E. Wilson Award in Nuclear Chemical Engineering. Over the course of his career, he authored more than 150 publications and presentations and held three U.S. patents. In 1976, he was elected to the National Academy of Engineering (NAE) for his “contributions to fast reactor technologies, nuclear fuel reprocessing, and especially the first remote-handling completely closed fuel-cycle plant.”

Milt remained an active contributor to the NAE until the end of his life. At the time of his death on March 31, 2018, he was serving on the committee that produced Analyses of Supplemental Treatment Approaches of Low Activity Waste at the Hanford Nuclear Reservation. Review #1. He also participated in numerous high-impact NAE committees, including the Committee on Improving the Assessment of the Proliferation Risk of Nuclear Fuel Cycles, the Committee on Nuclear Forensics, the Committee on Medical Isotope Production without Highly Enriched Uranium, and the Committee on the Management of Certain Radioactive Waste Streams Stored in Tanks at Three Department of Energy Sites.

He was recognized both nationally and internationally for his ability to bring creative insights to complex engineering challenges in the nuclear industry. He was equally valued for his organizational and leadership skills. Across his 75-year career, his deep technical knowledge, intellectual rigor, and impeccable integrity made him a trusted advisor to many institutions and colleagues. Perhaps one of his most defining attributes was his personality. He was meticulous about technical accuracy, unfailingly helpful with his time and guidance, and deeply collegial – especially in advisory panels or review activities. He was the kind of person who willingly took on difficult technical assignments when others hesitated, often staying late to ensure the job was done right. Above all, he was, as many who knew him have said, “a really nice guy.” His wonderful sense of humor was punchy and direct, yet always kind.

Milt and Mary were married until Mary’s passing in 1999. They had five children, Jim Levenson, Barbara Elter, Rick Levenson, Scott Levenson, and Janet Levenson, along with 13 grandchildren and step-grandchildren, and four great-grandchildren. Milt is survived by his partner, Sue Berryman.

His children recall that Milt was always looking for things to fix—taking apart washing machines, dishwashers, and other appliances. He loved rising early on weekends to prepare breakfast, giving Mary, mother of five, a chance to sleep in. When grandchildren arrived, he put his practical skills to use designing and making wooden toys. Throughout his life, he continued a tradition of home preserving: making jams, drying fruit, and kosher pickles and tomatoes. Around age 90, he even built a custom shed in Sue’s backyard. Because the available space was irregular, not a simple rectangle, he drafted the design and built the shed from scratch, without using a kit.

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¹We thank Sue Berryman and Milt’s children for helpful input.