Reister, Dave

              
ORAL HISTORY OF DAVE REISTER
Interviewed by Keith McDaniel
July 30, 2012
 
MR. MCDANIEL: This is Keith McDaniel and today is July 30th, 2012, and I am at the home of Mr. Dave Reister, and I guess we are between Oak Ridge and Knoxville. What is this considered, Knox county?
MR. REISTER: Solway.
MR. MCDANIEL: We're in Solway. Thanks so much for taking time to talk with us, I appreciate it. Let's start at the very beginning. Why don't you tell me about where you were born and raised and something about your family.
MR. REISTER:  Okay, I guess you can always put things on the cutting room floor so maybe I’ll give you more than you want.  I was raised in Redondo Beach, California. I was born actually in Los Angeles, but I grew up on the beach in Redondo Beach. It’s about ten miles south of the L.A. airport so I was within walking distance of the ocean when I was growing up.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. REISTER:  It was a very nice place to be.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I’m sure.
MR. REISTER:  And my parents, my mother was born in Canada and I’ll say something about her family later. And my father was born in Seattle, and they met at UCLA and graduated from UCLA and got married and I was born a few years later. I was born in 1942. And so I basically lived entirely in one house from the time I was born until I went off to college, so I had a very nice upbringing and the other thing, too, is that we've had some reunions and a lot of the people I went to school with, you know you have a period where you know you’re going from Kindergarten to high school, if your with the same people you really don't have any bonding with any other group that you ever had. I mean, you get married, but it's sort of a group that is interesting to have. So a lot of those people, I have seen a couple times at reunions and I have kept up with them on my Facebook page.
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go. Now did you have any brothers or sisters?
MR. REISTER:  I have one sister that is sort of two and a half years younger so she was like three grades behind. 
MR. MCDANIEL: So what did your mom and dad do? 
MR. REISTER: Well my mother, you know that was a time in which women usually stayed home. But my mother when she, when she had graduated from Santa Monica High School, pretty early though. One of things that I found out recently is that she had the highest grades of anybody whoever graduated from there at the point when she graduated.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. REISTER: But because she was young, she went off and worked for a year in San Francisco, just at the time when the Golden Gate Bridge happened, you know, in the late 30's. And she, her degree from UCLA was in psychology and then of course during the war, everybody in WWII, everybody got new jobs so she worked for, I think during the war, she worked for Goodyear Synthetic making synthetic rubber.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh is that right?
MR. REISTER: And after the war she may have worked for Alcoa because she had lots of aluminum pictures and sort of household kinds of things from Alcoa. My father had to work his way through college, so he worked sort of like in a gas station and had to sleep through some classes because he wasn't getting much sleep. He also had a physiology degree. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. REISTER: But during the war, he became a welder in the ship yards and didn't have to, never got drafted. Just at the point he was going to be drafted, the union said, you know he's doing a valuable job, he's making these ships and he should be able to stay home. Also during the war, like when one of my father's sisters moved in with us, so it was disruptive thing. Anyway after the war my father, he at one point worked for North American Aviation and he was a jig maker. I think he tried to set up a business in the late 40's where he could use some of his physiology to give people aptitude tests and be able to give them information on what field they might want to go into. But I think what happened was schools started doing that
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right, exactly.
MR. REISTER: And so his business model….
MR. MCDANIEL: It was a good idea but didn't quite work. 
MR. REISTER: Right and so he, when I was, most of the time when I was growing up he worked at a small pharmaceutical manufacturing company in L.A. and was the general manager.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
 MR. REISTER: But he would also build the machines that they were using to fill the bottles with medicine.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MR. REISTER: Now with some of his jig making and also out near the L.A. Airport there were surplus solenoids and things that you could use for making a piece of machinery so it was a very interesting time where everybody was sort of scam, you know at the end of WWII, you are at the point at which there had been the Depression and rationing, so people had been poor for a very long time, and at one point after the war, my father and my mother's brother built a house, a spec house. There was that sort of trying--
MR. MCDANIEL: Trying--
MR. REISTER: -- to keep your head above water.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, sure exactly. So, what year did you graduate High School?
MR. REISTER: '59.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you graduated in '59.
MR. REISTER: Well let me keep going on my mother, so my mother worked at various places and then at one point she was working at the Redondo Beach Public Library, and then she decided to get a master’s degree in library science and anyway she remained a librarian.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. REISTER:  Basically, her entire life and at some point she worked for a Los Angeles County Public Library, and later my parents moved to Laguna Beach because my father's company that he was working for then was suppose to work there, but they never did. But anyway my mother worked as a librarian at Irvine. So late in life, basically she had two pensions. One from California County Government and the other from the University of California and my father didn't have any pension.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. Right, exactly.
MR. REISTER:  Now high school basically, as I was in Los Angles and near Redondo Beach and went through the school system, so I went to Redondo Union High School.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. REISTER: And got interested in math, science kind of things. Actually, the science was really pretty bad, but more on the math. But also I got a general high school education. And then my parents had gone to UCLA so when I was going to go to college. I thought I would go a little further away, so I thought I'd go to Berkeley, which was sort of UCLA north.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. REISTER: And so I went to Berkeley in 1959, and by the time I had finished with my Ph.D. it was '69, so I spent a lot of time. But that was also Berkeley in the 60's so all kinds of things happened there, protest against the House Un-American Activity Committee and the civil rights movement and the war in Vietnam.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, what a place to be for a decade, you know if you’re going to pick a decade that would be the one that you would want to be at Berkeley. 
MR. REISTER: Well, and there were so many things going on in society, things opened up, you know.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. REISTER: At the start of my career, dorms had lock out, and by the end they had co-ed dorms. I guess birth control sort of happened then.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly, exactly.
MR. REISTER: It's an exciting time.
MR. MCDANIEL: So you got your degrees in what?
MR. REISTER: Well, my first degree was in engineering physics, and then I was in a Nuclear Engineering Department, and basically for my masters and then my Ph.D., it's in engineering science but it was from the nuclear engineering. My major professor was joint between the Nuclear Department and the Math Department
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. REISTER: So I basically, I recently got interested in STEM [Science, Technology, Engineering, and Mathematics], and basically my career has been in STEM.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really?
MR. REISTER: You know sort of science, technology, math, physics, you know sort of had, well anyway. Because my Ph.D. was in nuclear engineering things, nuclear engineering sort of came apart about the time I graduated. I continually got to reinvent myself.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, now how did it come apart?
MR. REISTER: Well actually let me go to the next step which is before I got my Ph.D. I had taken a job at the State University of New York at Buffalo. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. REISTER:  I had also gotten married, should I discuss?
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, sure.
MR. REISTER: Actually, when I was a freshman at Berkeley, I had a roommate that had gone to school at the same high school as my wife. And I heard her but she, when she came out of high school she went to Chico State, so she wasn't at Berkeley. Then a few years later, the roommate married her high school girlfriend and my wife was Maid of Honor. I think I saw her, but I hadn't met her. And then after my sophomore year, I was sort of burned out going to school. I had been going to school--
MR. MCDANIEL: Forever.
MR. REISTER: Forever, and so I took off for a semester and worked for a company, and actually it was a company called Atomic International, so it was building nuclear reactors. And so my supervisor was a bright young Ph.D. from UCLA, so I sort of got a role model to give me direction to go from there. Something I might want to do when I grow up. And so then when I got back from there, at some point I was invited over to, my wife at that time had gotten there and I was invited over to visit at one point. And we hit it off within two weeks from the time we met, we decided to get married.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, wow.
MR. REISTER: But then we waited until she graduated. I sort of had lost a year by taking off so I spent 5 years going to college. So we got married, we've been married now 49 years. So we are getting pretty close to 50. And you know, it's sort of amazing how so many things have changed in our lives, but we still like each other.
MR. MCDANIEL: That's good.
MR. REISTER: We both like each other.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well at least you like her right?
MR. REISTER: So, any rate then, so jumping ahead I had planned to get a Ph.D., had worked on a Ph.D., and I at the point when I thought I had finished, I started interviewing for jobs, and I had got a job at the State University of New York at Buffalo. So in January of 1968, we pack all of our worldly possessions into a trailer and drove to Buffalo in January.
MR. MCDANIEL:  And you were used to living in Southern California.
MR. REISTER: Or Berkeley.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. REISTER: It's still pretty warm.
MR. MCDANIEL: It's still pretty warm. So.
MR. REISTER: And because of that we drove the whole way south and sort of came across on Interstate 10.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. REISTER: But any rate we got to Buffalo.
MR. MCDANIEL: And this was in '68?
MR. REISTER: Yeah, January '68. But I hadn't finished my Ph.D. I finished my first draft, but my thesis advisor said I needed a second draft. But Berkeley had student disruptions that had resulted in the Chancellor being fired and replaced by a guy name Martin Meyerson, he had become the Chancellor at Buffalo. Buffalo was a very exciting university at the point when I got there. It had been a private University but then the state had tried to emulate California, and it had been acquired by the state and they had a lot of money and sort of upgraded their faculty, and I came in at the end of that wave and there were lots of experiments. And I was in a department which was called the Division of Interdisciplinary Studies, but it was really Engineering Science, which Engineering Science is sort of fluid mechanics and solid mechanics, and applied physics.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. REISTER:  And so it was, you know a place where I fit and it was interesting to meet people from the other discipline.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. REISTER:  And Buffalo allowed, I had a very light course load and they encouraged you to sort of interact with the students so I could teach a freshman seminars. And one of the things I picked to look at was thermal pollution because that’s one of the issues that had come up with nuclear power, was that they were causing problems. There was starting to be fights, what had happened with nuclear power was that, I think, the first reactor shipping port in like '58, or something, and hundreds of reactors, well maybe not hundreds, well we got to a hundred reactors pretty quickly, like within ten years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. REISTER: Then it sort of stopped. And so that happened just about the time when I graduated, that stopped.
MR. MCDANIEL: That stopped.
MR. REISTER: And I think the last reactors were lured in 1970 or '75, a little after.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. REISTER: But roughly there's starting to be complaints about locating them and one of the things was the thermal pollution things so I taught this class. And then a few years later, near Buffalo was the a fuel reprocessing plant, and a few years later there was a strike there and there were some horror stories about what was going on at this plant. You know there were things like when they needed to do something where they have to expose people to radiation, they would gather a bunch of winos together and sort of, there were a certain amount of dose that you could have over three months or whatever and they sort of burned them out.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. REISTER: Which is might be a low cost way, but it's not the right way to do it. So anyway I heard a bunch of these horror stories and I wrote a letter to the Atomic Energy Commission at the time saying you know people, the Union feels that these things happened, are they true?
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. REISTER: By writing that letter, the local group of the Sierra Club got in touch with me and asked me to head an energy task force for them. So I joined the Sierra Club in 1970, and remained active in the Sierra Club. And then what happened with that was that the, at some point I got a reply from the AEC that they would be willing to come to talk to me and one other person, but you know it was a private meeting.  We met and they said basically everything in the letter was true, but they would sort of denied it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. REISTER: And, in fact, when I came to Oak Ridge, jumping a head a little, I also talked to Floyd Culler whose one of the grand old people in Oak Ridge about that and he knew all about the West Valley Plant. He just, it hadn't been run well--
MR. MCDANIEL: Did he know about your letter?
MR. REISTER: No, in fact I don't, I've looked in my records and I can't find my letter.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh is that right?
MR. REISTER: I know I wrote it, but in fact there is another, just a few years ago I ran into somebody who worked at that plant. In fact, I think I have his business card and he felt that they had done a good job, he didn't, he had a very different view.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, of course.
MR. REISTER: But it's interesting that things like that can pop up after, I don't know, four years.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, how long were you at Buffalo?
MR. REISTER: I was there until '74, so when I came to Oak Ridge.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. REISTER:  Basically what had happened was I had gotten more, more and more interested in, I guess one of the things that happened was I had my serious work and then I got involved with Sierra Club. And at one time I wrote an abstract for an American Nuclear Society meeting and I put one in for my serious work and another for some reports I got from the environmental things and what the radiation levels where in a creek and that sort of thing the state was meaning.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, sure.
MR. REISTER: And my serious work was not accepted but the environmental one was. I was sort of getting the feeling, and also I found that I wasn't sure I wanted to be a university professor, and then I'm interested in lots of different things. I didn't want to get deeply into something and also when I taught the same course three years in a row it, I like to learn things but I couldn't see doing it the rest of my life. And so I wanted a little more challenge so I was trying to, and by that time we had two children and my wife was tired of Buffalo and so we wanted to go back to California so I tried, sent out résumés to try to get back to California and nothing much happened. And at one point, I was asked to organize a seminar series and so I invited people who were doing interesting energy in the environment kinds of things. And one of them told me about the Institute for Energy Analysis there that Alvin was starting in Oak Ridge. So that’s how I sent the résumé there. I also had sent a résumé to the Atomic Energy Commission and had a job offer from them in basically the suburbs of Washington, D.C. after, I had also interviewed in Oak Ridge, so I had to sort of choose between going to Washington, D.C. or coming to Oak Ridge. My wife and I decided that we would be happier in Oak Ridge. 
MR. MCDANIEL: So you moved to Oak Ridge in?
MR. REISTER: '74.
MR. MCDANIEL: In '74.
MR. REISTER: And I didn't work for the National Lab, I work for ORAU. The Institute for Energy Analysis. See basically what had happened was--
MR. MCDANIEL: This was after Weinberg had left the Lab and had gone to ORAU and had started this institute.
MR. REISTER: Right. And basically Alvin got fired because he got cross wise with Milton Shaw.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. REISTER: So somebody else will probably fill you in on that, but anyway he created this institute, and actually, I say I was hired by Alvin, but Alvin wasn't in the picture really because what had happened was he started the Institute and then immediately got a job in Washington, D.C. as the head of technology for the agency, the Federal Energy Administration, or whatever. So McPherson, H.G. McPherson, was basically the person I talked to, and some other on the staff. So any rate, I came to Oak Ridge at that point. In my years working for, I worked for 11 years for the Institute for Energy Analysis and I became an Energy Economist. And basically I was interested in mathematic models on things, nuclear reactors but I worked with a bright young Ph.D. and we'd make some really, I think, important advances in the way economic models are done and energy demand models and what’s the right way to look at energy in the economy, and that sort of thing. In fact my collaborator was a guy named J. Edmonds, who has remained active in that field. I've switched fields a number of times since then, but he has stayed. Oh I guess, he created models that could be used to look at greenhouse gas emissions over the next hundred years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh is that right?
MR. REISTER: And that’s one of the aspects of what we were looking at. A long term forecast of what was going to happen. You know Alvin was very interested in global warming because it would provide an excuse for having breeder reactors. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. REISTER: And in fact one of the things--
MR. MCDANIEL: Yeah, talk about that a little bit. Talk about his thoughts on that.
MR. REISTER: Well when I was at Buffalo and joined this Sierra Club, I formed a little group of people and we would talk about energy futures and energy options, and that sort of thing, and I got a hold of a paper that Alvin had written with a collaborator whose one of the major people that he worked with, whose name escapes me at the moment, but he was talking about a world of 20 billion people living at the same standard of living as the United States, and all the power would come from like four thousand breeder reactors and he sort of worked out the details of how that would work. That's sort of the way he was thinking about things. He had a guy name Howard Geller, who thought about using energy you could use to make everything else you needed to. But it was sort of the big picture of the way of doing a nuclear world.
MR. MCDANIEL:  And that was sort of the way he worked wasn't it? He really was a big picture kind of guy.
MR. REISTER:  Yeah and in fact one of the things that for example, in the 50's he got interested in using nuclear reactors to desalinate water in the Middle East and he had people in both Israel and Egypt working together in Oak Ridge on plans for these reactors. And it was the only place in the world where Israelis and Egyptians were working together. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, my goodness.
MR. REISTER: So it was a big view of how to deal with important issues and technical fixes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. REISTER: How to make things work. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Alright, let’s get back to your work. 
MR. REISTER: So anyway. Okay well, basically the very first year was the best year for the institute in that Alvin was in Washington and we were his staff. So, we had a client that understood things and was really interested in what we had to do. And so I ended up, one of the things that Alvin was interested in was having a bunch of reactors in an energy center. So you could have a cluster of 30 or 40 reactors on a site and then you could also have a professional staff there that was doing research of doing something but if there was ever a problem, you'd have a bunch of really well educated people that could come and solve problems and, they could do it anyway. And so when he was in Washington, he commissioned a study on energy centers at ORNL, and I ended up working on that, with a guy named Cal Burwell, who was one of his people he trusted very highly on lots of things. And I became an expert on transmission lines, electric transmission lines. So it was, somebody needed to do it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. REISTER: They had a consultant from Cornell named Sam Link. So I went up and sort of got tutored and became an expert on transmission lines. 
MR. MCDANIEL: So that was, you went to ORNL to do that, is that correct? Where you at the Lab?
MR. REISTER:  Well I didn't go there, it was basically that there was a sort of, there were lots of--
MR. MCDANIEL: Overlaps.
MR. REISTER: Exchanges between ORNL and ORAU. I mean we're very close to each other.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right exactly.
MR. REISTER: So, lot of interactions.
MR. MCDANIEL: So--
MR. REISTER: I was always an ORAU employee. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really? So what was the next project you worked on after that?
MR. REISTER: Well, let’s see.
MR. MCDANIEL: The next major, major project.
MR. REISTER: Yeah, one of the things when I was in Buffalo, I was interacting with people in the School of Business and got interested in input-output tables, which are structured how things flow in the economy, and that is sort of a good frame work for thinking about how energy flows, and there was an interest in net energy analysis, of how much energy is required, directly and indirectly, to make something happen. So people were arguing that nuclear power consumed more energy than it produced. And so we did a study on that and I was involved with that. And for several years we did things on net energy analysis. Actually, that's something that happened, well, it was really in those very early days. But any rate, that sort of led me into interest of how the economy worked, which is part of what I was doing later with the energy models. Let’s see, I guess one time I was asked to half time on nuclear waste management, so I spent time visiting Hanford and Savannah River, and talking with the people at ORNL about that and what the options were in waste management. And I sort of decided that if you look at what had happened in Hanford where you had these tanks that had leaked, there wasn't really much risk to the environment, in that they're in a desert because they're in the Cascade Mountains, which is basically a rain shadow. The other side of mountains is going to be dry and they're like a hundred feet or something above the water table, so there was sort of no mechanism for anything at the surface. I mean things could go down 20 feet or something but they're not going to go all the way down. And so you've got these things, even if the steel has rusted away and things can move, they're not going anywhere, so what you have is almost safe disposable. You know, they've spent million and billions of dollars making little robots to try to clean these things up. I mean, the only time when waste ever got down to the water table is when they had things that were called cribs, where basically people would keep pouring water on the surface and eventually you'd flush the radioactivity down into the water table. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. REISTER: So, I had thought at one point about storing waste underneath the middle of plates under the ocean. You know very stable things and they'd be there for a very long time, but decided anyway that Hanford is almost safe enough. You know the public has been worried about waste storage for forever, and still is. And it seems like, where is the risk? I mean, who exactly has ever been killed by radioactive waste, and when you just think of scenarios, no matter what you did it could be if you had some cash of radioactive materials and somebody in a hundred years or a thousand years decides that it's an aphrodisiac for something, they might start mining it and then you could give a big dose to lots of people.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. REISTER: But just because you can imagine something that could damage people, it doesn't mean that there is really a mechanism for that to happen.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly.
MR. REISTER: And it's sort of like with Fukushima. There's been discussion of it being a great disaster and it is a financial disaster because you know, three reactors have melted down. And that’s lots of billions of dollars’ worth of reactors. But my impression is that nobody has gotten a big enough dose that there will ever be a major impact on humans because of what had happened here. You know it isn't, compared to earthquakes or other things that kill lots of different people. This isn't a place where there was an enormous amount of human deaths associated with this nuclear meltdown, and in fact you know, it's one of the things that people have been worrying about for 40 years, what would happen if a reactor meltdown, but three of them melted down and very little happen, you know. It was a sort of slow motion thing and you can say that maybe they should have been prepared for it, but it's really hard to get ready for a tsunami that is forty foot high, well it's highly unlikely here because we're not anywhere near an ocean. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Right, exactly, exactly.
MR. REISTER: But anyway maybe they should have had it, it's--
MR. MCDANIEL: Let me ask you a question, I know in your background your interests are about the environment and being a good steward of our earth, things such as that. A lot of people would think that that's kind of opposite of the nuclear, of a nuclear power plant.  Talk about that just a little bit, I mean, you know.
MR. REISTER: Well, for a long time, my position was nuclear power is fine if it is done right, but it hasn't been done right. But thinking of things like West Valley, where people, the private sector were cutting corners or some of the people at utilities just didn't know what they were doing when they got these reactors.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. REISTER: On the other hand, we've had those reactors in place now for, I don't know now, forty years and you know, where is the damage? I mean, there's lots of radioactive waste from Alvin's point of view, the breeder reactors, spent fuel is what you need to run the breeders. That's you get the plutonium, you can keep going forever, so you know it's just, it's the fuel source of the future. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. REISTER: So I think my feeling is we've really showed that we are perfectly capable. Alvin talked about a Faustian Bargain, but we've sort of made that bargain, we've had these reactors running for a very long time and it seems to me that there is very little damage, you can, you can associate with them. And one of the things that Alvin was very interested in, and he, he sort of started research on global warming because there are lots and lots of damage that's done by fossil fuels. Not only that, there's a limited amount of fossil fuels. You know we, humans have been on this planet for a millions of years, and some long time but we've not been using fossil fuels for very long. Just a few hundred years.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. REISTER: And we've used a huge fraction of them, we're right near peak oil, you know, which may very well. Well anyway, the reason we have, I think the reason and of course I have been expecting peak oil. There's a guy named King Hubbard who came up with the notion King Oil, and when I was an energy economist I was in the same room as King Hubbard. So I've been talking to my wife about this and other people for 40 years, and it's about to happen.
MR. MCDANIEL: And what is that. Tell me, I don't know.
MR. REISTER: Well, see, in any field of oil, there's it's a geological formation and there's a certain amount of oil in it. And you can exhaust it and you can do some things to try and get more. Basically, what you've got to think of it as being sand with oil in it and you try and get it out, there can be some oil that gets bypassed. So there isn't any way really to get it out. There has to be some pressure or something to make that oil flow out, or if it's really heavy and won't be very viscus, you can inject steam and try and get it out, which is what you do with things like tar sand and heavy oil in California. But anyway, you basically come to the point at which you won't have any more oil that's economical to get out of that field. And basically, the peak oil production in the United States happened in 1972, so since then any growth has to come from imports.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, I see.
MR. REISTER: And the International Energy Agency Chief Economist made a good case for saying peak oil will happen in 2020.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right?
MR. REISTER: So we're here in 2012. And you know once there is peak oil in the world, we don't get to import and there are other kinds of things, but they can be enormously distractive.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. REISTER: For example, shale oil. There is shale gas and shale oil are very different. Anyway shale oil, you basically are taking rock that has some carbon stuff in it, but it's not oil but it's something you can make into oil.
MR. MCDANIEL: You can make oil out of it.
MR. REISTER: You’re doing it, but it's all in the deserts of Colorado, so there's no water around and you end up, and I think, the energy density of that is much less than very low grades of coal. So that you have to mine an enormous amount of rock and process it in order to get to that stuff. And it really might make as much sense to turn coal into oil. See if you think about this world that Alvin was dealing with of 20 billion people, even all of the coal. Anyway, the fossil fuels go very quickly, even if. So we are just doing something that seems normal to us by using all this fossil fuels but it isn't, it isn't sustainable. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. REISTER: And that's the kind of thing that, you know Alvin was. Now--
MR. MCDANIEL: It's like having a bucket full of money and taking a dollar out every day and then your friend comes and takes a dollar out every day, eventually you’re going to run out of money unless you find a way to replenish it--
MR. REISTER: It's basically--
MR. MCDANIEL:--or create a new source of revenue.
MR. REISTER: If you have a jar of water and sugar and you put in bacteria, they'll multiply until it's all gone and then that's the end of it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. REISTER: And we're sort of on that path and not only that, from the environmental point of view. There's a guy that I read books by, he basically argues that humans are scavengers so that we develop tools so that when we came upon a carcass that some other animal had been with a stone tool, we could cut off a piece and then get away so that no one else would get it from us. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. REISTER: We have gradually developed the capabilities of competing with all the top predators and we basically have, we're basically on route to exterminating all of the other animals on the planet. So that you know all of their habitats are at risk and we're over fishing things and so there are a lot of unsustainable things we're doing. You know, global warming is sort of an aspect of all that but there are many other kinds of things. And actually lets come back to Alvin for a moment, Alvin was not an environmentalist. He doesn't care about anything, but humans.
MR. MCDANIEL: Really.
MR. REISTER: So he was not at all concerned about drilling for oil in the Arctic or anteing or exterminating species.
MR. MCDANIEL: But, but this work 40 years ago when he was working on this, he saw this. He saw out into the future and said ozone, global warming is going to be, going to become a real issue.
MR. REISTER: Yes, but he was feeling that I think as, what he was wanting was long term energy sources. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. REISTER: So from a long term energy source, there is this sun and wind and that sort of thing which are all sort of the sun. But you know, he came up with nuclear power, he did not believe in fusion. You know he was willing to bet anybody that if they picked a date when fusion would happen, he'd bet them a dollar that he was wrong.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, so really even though this global warming thing, he saw it but he really used that as a, as an argument--
MR. REISTER: to build--
MR. MCDANIEL: to build reactors.
MR. REISTER: to build breeder reactors.
MR. MCDANIEL: Which was his thing. 
MR. REISTER: On the other hand when he was running the Federal Energy Office, he did create the federal program, well for global warming, but also for renewable energy. Yeah, so he created, he was instrumental in creating what's now the Solar Energy Research Institute, or whatever it is called.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, let’s get back to you, let’s finish your career and then we'll talk a little bit more about Dr. Weinberg.
MR. REISTER: Okay, well, let’s see. The institute, the high point, I guess one of the things that happened at the institute is that Alvin invited, we had some symposiums and he invited Amory Lovins to one of those. And Amory is somebody that has been, since the 70's, has been talking about energy futures and alternative things and is still quite active in that. And another thing Alvin did is he got a young man named Bill Clark to come to ORNL and lead our global energy or global warming things. And he wrote and organized, he led a team that created a book of climate change whatever, global warming or something 1982, or whatever year it was. And he's now a professor at Kennedy School at MIT, at Harvard. 
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. REISTER: So, he was a major figure and it was an exciting place. That's one of the things about the institute, lots of very famous people would come and visit Alvin, and come and sit and talk with him. So any rate, when the institute, well in the very first year we had a very good client, so our clients started to go downhill. Oh, you know, because initially we got some money out of doing policy analysis. And we're sort of competing with them, you know the government doesn't like having somebody like Alvin second guess them, it's not something where, why should they pay to have them, to be embarrassed by being so stupid. So it wasn't a good business model and so any rate, Alvin retired at one point and then I decided to jump ship and go to ORNL, and I thought I would end up in the Energy Division where I had contacts with, but they never offered me a job so I ended up in the Engineering Physics Division. Which had been the neutrons physic, which was with a whole bunch of retired nuclear engineers and the group I ended up with are people who when the money, I think they had been doing fast neutron breeder reactor physic analysis and the money got cut off. One year, they got a million dollars to do energy model analysis and the next year they got into global warming and the third year they got into robotics.
MR. MCDANIEL: So from year to year it was just depending on whatever they could find the money to do?
MR. REISTER: They were good entrepreneurs, so I went there, I did energy supply models for a while, and then I did some robotics and then I, one of the guys that hired me, he basically got into geophysical kinds of things. I became a geophysicist and then later got into lasers and so it's basically people-- 
MR. MCDANIEL: Smart people who can do just about anything right? Is that what it was?
MR. REISTER: Write proposals and get things done.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure exactly.
MR. REISTER: It's been a very nice time, and actually six years ago, I was going to be fired, I was on overhead and I couldn't do it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure.
MR. REISTER: I decided I really wanted to quit so I said I'll just be part time if somebody pays me that's fine, if not I'm a rich old man.
MR. MCDANIEL: There you go.
MR. REISTER: I can cope. And so you know, I just spent six years doing that and most of the time we had something to do and had a lot of fun. So I just retired on July 1st.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
 MR. REISTER: Any rate I had a very good run. You know, I've been happy doing that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Sure, let’s talk a little bit about your family. When you moved to Oak Ridge, you said what year was that? '74?
MR. REISTER: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay, you moved to Oak Ridge and where did you all live?
MR. REISTER: Well, lived on Peach, off of Pennsylvania.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. REISTER: Near the Oak Ridge High School, and initially I worked at ORAU, which is down where the museum is so, initially I could ride a bike to work. Well, when I was at Buffalo at the end, I bought my first house for 11,000 dollars.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right. 
MR. REISTER: And I had a five minute walk to my office.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. REISTER: Right across the street and that's the nice way to go. That's a good commute. And I didn't care about any snow. And I could take the kids in on the weekends to draw on the blackboard. But anyway when I first moved to Oak Ridge I rode a bike down the hill and ride it up hill so I didn't have to get sweaty at all, it was all downhill.
MR. MCDANIEL: Exactly.
MR. REISTER: So I did that for a long time, and then you know after 11 years I switched jobs. I needed to get a car and move to other means of transportation even though some people do ride their bikes. Because riding a bike on Bethel Valley Road doesn't appeal to me.
MR. MCDANIEL: I guess not. I think we can pick up the scratching of your chin.
MR. REISTER: Oh, okay.
MR. MCDANIEL: The microphone right there. So but you lived in that house on Peach for about 20 years right?
MR. REISTER: 22 years.
MR. MCDANIEL: 22 years then you moved out here.
MR. REISTER: What happened was while I was at Buffalo, my wife, in addition to being a mother of two children, got a master’s degree in library science. So initially, when we moved here she sort of took care of the kids; at one point, she switched jobs at the Clinton Library with another lady.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. REISTER:  And in 1980, she got a job at the Downtown Knoxville Library. So she was commuting a long way, and she was sort of agitating for us to move to Downtown Knoxville. But any rate we decided to split the difference and we moved to Karns.
MR. MCDANIEL: Right.
MR. REISTER: When we moved to Karns, we came to this lot and it was just all covered by trees, but we just thought, oh, this looks good. We designed and built a house and moved into it.
MR. MCDANIEL: And your kids, I guess, when they moved to Oak Ridge they were very young weren't they?
MR. REISTER: Yeah.
MR. MCDANIEL: So, they basically grew up in Oak Ridge.
MR. REISTER: Both of them graduated in Oak Ridge High School. Now my daughter was a Merit Scholar. I'm a product of public university but the three best closest public universities are Virginia, North Carolina and Indiana. So we visited all of those, but my daughter went up a rank and she went to Michigan.
MR. MCDANIEL: Okay.
MR. REISTER: So she went up to Michigan for a couple years, and she got interested in homelessness. And so she moved into a homeless shelter in Washington, D.C. We went up and inspected it.
MR. MCDANIEL: Yes, of course.
MR. REISTER: The key homeless shelter headed by a charismatic person, and so she did that for a while, and actually she came back to Michigan and took over an abandoned house and created her own homeless shelter. Anyway, then suddenly at Christmas one year she said I’m coming home. And she came home and said I’m going to the University of Tennessee. Well, I said, well, you can't just walk in there. But she could because when she was in high school she was in advanced math and was in their computer. So for the classes she took in high school so she could sign up for classes.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. REISTER: You know as a National Merit Scholar I think she got a one timed payment of 1,000 dollars.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh really?
MR. REISTER: When she went to UT they gave her a four year scholarship.
MR. MCDANIEL: Is that right?
MR. REISTER: And she used it all. And then she wanted to be a physician and when she came back to Tennessee, she wanted to be a nurse. And then she got interested in sociology, but she, in fact, she went to Holland at one point, and studied how they were doing health care to rural people in Holland. But then she became a physician in internal medicine, and she now lives in the state of Washington. And my son, both of my children are gay and my son wanted to be a housewife. When he was young, I built a house for him and he did things in it, but he cleaned houses for a while, and he is very shy. When the internet came along, he met a man on the internet. They've been together now for 10 years. They're in North Carolina. But near where the man's family is. But they've decided North Carolina is not gay friendly, so they are planning to move to Albuquerque, New Mexico.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, is that right? So you just retired, in your life where you and your wife involved in any civic organizations or groups or things such as that? Your family in Oak Ridge?
MR. REISTER: Well I guess we went to the Playhouse regularly, and you know had been supporting it for most of the 40 years we've been here. We're not at the very top, but we're close to the top of the contributors. I think as I mentioned I had been a member of the Sierra Club, but I didn't do anything about the Sierra Club when I was in Oak Ridge. When I moved into this house, there was a plan to build an interstate that would cut across my driveway, so I got interested in the orange route, blue route thing. And in fact, I ended up on a citizen advisory, and I got active then in the Sierra Club again. And as soon as someone shows up at the Sierra Club meeting, you get on the executive committee. So anyway, I did that and I've been active in that.
MR. MCDANIEL: Active in that.
MR. REISTER:  It was after I moved here that I got interested in the Cumberland Trail. I spent a lot of time, I initially was interested in the Smokies when I moved here, but I found that instead of going to the Smokies, that right in my back yard from Oak Ridge, were the Cumberlands. So I spent a lot of time exploring and poking around in that area.  I'd been a member of Tennessee Citizens for Wilderness Planning Organization that the Russell's had started for years, but at one point they asked me to go to a kick-off meeting for refurbishing the Cumberland Trail, and in fact, I had walked on a segment of the Cumberland Trail with friends. It goes around Dutch Valley.
MR. MCDANIEL: Oh, okay.
MR. REISTER: But anyway, TCWP wasn't interested, but when I got involved in the Sierra Club I decided that I would do the Cumberland Trail as a Sierra Club thing. So I have been very active in that, financially supporting and that sort of thing for 20 years or something like that.
MR. MCDANIEL: So now that you’re retired, what are your plans?
MR. REISTER: Well, I’ve been working part time for quite a while so I think I'm going to keep doing the same sort of thing that I'm doing. I run some National Sierra webpages. I'm running web pages and the newsletter for the Sierra Club. I've been interested in energy policy debates so I have lots of e-mail to read. And I've been traveling some.
MR. MCDANIEL: Well, we'll get to the other stuff in a minute, but I want to thank you for taking time to share your life with us and something about your work, we certainly appreciate that. Thank you so much.
MR. REISTER: Well I think I've had an interesting life and so it's nice to have a sort of stage to leave something because I know I'm never going to write it all down.
MR. MCDANIEL: Alright we'll thank you very much. 

[END OF INTERVIEW]