Graphite Reactor physicist returns to ORNL

Energetic, affable and remarkably light on his feet, 98-year-old Ross E. Blevins is like a Forrest Gump of the nuclear era. A World War II and Korea veteran, he participated in some of the 20th century's most pivotal events and encountered some of its most noteworthy individuals.

Blevins' U.S. military service included visiting the aftermath of the bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki and witnessing subsequent nuclear tests. He worked from December 1956 until April 1969 in nuclear physics research at the Department of Energy's Oak Ridge National Laboratory, then went to work for the Tennessee Valley Authority, helping to establish TVA's first nuclear power plants.

On March 18, 2026, Blevins returned to visit ORNL with his son, Rody Blevins, his daughter, Teresa Johnston, and their spouses, Mary Beth Blevins and Rod Johnston. Rody had noticed interim Facilities and Operations Director Lantz Turner's ORNL baseball cap when they encountered each other randomly on a vacation cruise in the Panama Canal, which sparked a conversation. Rody shared some of his father's extraordinary story, and plans for a Blevins family visit to the lab soon emerged.

"What a wonderful day for Ross Blevins, his family and the entire ORNL community," Turner said. "He shared several memories and funny stories about his time at ORNL and really seemed to enjoy being back at the lab. With most of the Greatest Generation fading into history, it was a pleasure to celebrate one of the people who created our national laboratory."

Touring the Graphite Reactor where he had worked decades ago, Blevins' memories were sharp.

"This shield here, that rolled up to these holes there, and that's where you pulled your radioactive material back in," he said. "Then you'd carry it to a hot cell, and you'd have manipulators to operate remotely, and equipment - you know, lathes and saws and milling machines and welders and stuff - and you'd cut it up for your experiments."

Born in 1928 and raised in Tennessee's Johnson County, Blevins served in the United States Army Air Forces during World War II in the Pacific Theater, carrying a briefcase for General Douglas MacArthur and earning a master's degree in meteorology. He toured Hiroshima and Nagasaki in the aftermath of the only nuclear weapons ever used in warfare.

"It was total…everything was gone," Blevins said. "I was just…speechless."

He also served in the Korean War, attended two nuclear tests in the Aleutian Islands and used the G.I. Bill to earn a bachelor's degree in physics from Middle Tennessee State University, later taking additional courses in engineering and physics at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville.

Blevins raised his family in the Claxton area of Anderson County, Tennessee, before settling on a farm in Clinton in the early 1990s, where he still resides.

Blevins joined the lab in 1956 on a military contract with General Electric, eventually working on the Graphite Reactor, the Oak Ridge Research Reactor, the Tower Shielding Reactor, the Low-Intensity Test Reactor, the Bulk Shielding Reactor and the High Flux Isotope Reactor.

While at the Graphite Reactor, he tested the properties of all the major metallic elements in the periodic table, contributing to a vast trove of knowledge that was emerging in a still-nascent nuclear era. Blevins' work on nuclear physics, shielding, engineering and chemistry would intersect with other Oak Ridge sites and facilities across the country and beyond, helping to make him into a seasoned traveler who visited all 50 states and many countries on multiple continents.

He even met the man who discovered plutonium, nuclear chemist Glenn Seaborg.

"Seaborg made trips out here. He was doing testing. I helped," Blevins said, adding, "He liked to go trout fishing."

Blevins also met the father of the nuclear navy, Admiral Hyman Rickover. "I didn't talk to him, but we had some meetings with him."

Security was a little different back then. Sometimes, Blevins would come in for an extra few hours of work at the Graphite Reactor on a Saturday, and he'd even bring his children. Rody and Teresa fondly remember being left outside the Graphite Reactor to play and visiting ORNL swans at the pond on the main campus. Still, with a top-secret security clearance for 35 years, Blevins never told his family about his work, but one persistent project he engaged in for years involved the unrealized quest for an airborne reactor.

"We were studying the properties so we could build a nuclear-powered airplane," Blevins said, referring to the Aircraft Nuclear Propulsion program. "We worked on the engines for them and got the temperature up to 5,000 degrees Fahrenheit. That's how hot it got! We tested it on the reactors out there. Shielding, primarily. We had to build special equipment to measure the temperature inside, as there was nothing on the market for that at the time."

The nuclear-powered aircraft program helped build Blevins' expertise in nuclear physics, well before universities had established research reactors or doctoral programs in the field. The nation's first Department of Nuclear Engineering wasn't founded until 1957, at the University of Tennessee.

This meant on-the-job training and classroom instruction for engineers and scientists, akin to the laboratory/classroom model deployed after the war at the Oak Ridge School of Reactor Technology on ORNL's campus. While here, Blevins occasionally chatted with ORNL's longest-serving director, Alvin Weinberg, who was an engaged, hands-on leader.

"He was curious. He'd come down into your room, you know, when you're doing studies," Blevins said. "He'd come by and ask you what you're doing, what the outcome was, and what information you'd got out of it."

Weinberg, Seaborg and Rickover are among the nuclear superstars Blevins knew, but he remembers a quite unexpected brush with another American icon, too.

"We were doing experiments one day, and I turned around, and there was Jackie Kennedy," he said. "I did a double take and gave her a pretty good look!" John F. Kennedy and Jackie visited ORNL in 1959, a year before the senator from Massachusetts was elected president.

"All the world would come visit from everywhere. South Africa, prime ministers, from all over," Blevins recalled. "The government would bring them in on tours because it was the first operational reactor. We'd show them the control rooms and facilities and equipment."

Blevins eventually shifted from ORNL into a career as a nuclear power plant design engineer at TVA. During a period of job cuts in the late sixties and early seventies, he and fellow nuclear experts decamped from the lab to aid in TVA's rapid expansion into nuclear power, which at that time needed Blevins' specific skillset to develop its first three nuclear power plants. He worked for TVA until his retirement in 1988.

Blevins still gardens but has only recently been talked out of his longtime wood-chopping habit. An avid bowler since his early 20s and a winner of multiple state championships, he's still having a great time with his friends at the Clinton Community Center, where he's been a regular since 1978.

Today, Blevins is also the longest-serving volunteer at the Norris Dam Visitors Center. He calls it "my dam job."

Asked what's left on his bucket list at age 98, Blevins didn't miss a beat. "I need to go to South America and Africa," he said. "Haven't been there yet!"

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy's Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science. - Chris Driver