E. Charles Crume Jr

E. Charles Crume Jr died peacefully on 18 October 2021 in Oak Ridge, Tennessee, after a long struggle with dementia. His five decades of work in physics spanned both fission and fusion research.

Charlie was born on 14 November 1931 in Dayton, Ohio. He received a full-tuition scholarship to Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana, and received his AB in physics in 1953. He then moved to Middletown, Connecticut, where he earned an MA in physics from Wesleyan University in 1955. His research on piezoelectricity was supervised by Karl S. Van Dyke and Vernet E. Eaton.

In 1956, Charlie joined Pratt & Whitney Aircraft Corporation as a test engineer at the Connecticut Advanced Nuclear Engineering Laboratory, where he planned and performed critical experiments in the CANEL Nuclear Physics Laboratory and assisted in the development of nuclear criticality safety rules for the facility.

Some of those experiments required facilities not available at CANEL. In arranging to perform them at the Oak Ridge Critical Experiments Facility, Charlie became acquainted with A. Dixon Callihan. Callihan assisted Charlie in securing a position in 1964 at the Oak Ridge Y-12 Plant, where he developed computational and experimental techniques for analyzing the nuclear criticality safety of fissionable material in manufacturing and storage environments. He also took advantage of the Educational Assistance Program offered by Union Carbide Corporation’s Nuclear Division to begin work on a PhD in physics at the University of Tennessee.

In December 1968, Charlie wrote to his supervisor at Y-12 about his selection of a research problem for his dissertation. Arguing that “work in the area of criticality physics, both experimental and theoretical, now falls in the realm of nuclear engineering,” he stated that his background was in physics and he wished “to remain a physicist.” He proposed, therefore, to apply his experience in Monte Carlo calculations to plasma physics. Whether this proposal was influenced by the results then being obtained in the T-3 tokamak is not recorded, but it was certainly an exciting time for fusion. Charlie’s proposal was approved, and in June 1969 he began working with the Theoretical Group in Oak Ridge National Laboratory’s Thermonuclear Division.

Charlie completed his dissertation, “Nonlinear evolution of flute-like plasma microinstabilities,” in 1972 under the direction of Owen Eldridge. He then officially transferred from Y-12 to the Plasma Theory Section of the ORNL Thermonuclear Division (later the Fusion Energy Division). He developed and used a variety of computational programs to advance the exploration of the behavior of magnetically confined plasmas, including the bootstrap current, the L–H transition in tokamak plasmas, particle and heat transport in stellarator plasmas, and anomalous transport in both tokamak and stellarator plasmas. He made three visits to the Soviet Union as a participant in US–USSR scientific exchanges, including a two-month stint as a visiting scientist at the Kurchatov Institute. In 1987 Charlie transferred to the Toroidal Confinement Physics Section, working with the spectroscopy group to measure and interpret impurity behavior and infer plasma parameters such as ion and electron temperature, while continuing to collaborate with colleagues in the Plasma Theory Section.

In 1990, when national funding for fusion research was reduced, Charlie returned to nuclear criticality safety, serving as head of ORNL’s program in that area until he retired in 1994. He continued to work as a consultant on all aspects of nuclear criticality safety until 2012.

After receiving his doctorate, Charlie found time for two activities that would occupy many of his nonworking hours for years to come: flying small airplanes and participating in community theater. For nearly 20 years, he was the proud owner of a Cessna P206, which he flew to Alaska in 1993. Flying was, he once said, the perfect combination of the technical and the aesthetic, and he was always happy to take friends and colleagues on sightseeing flights.

Charlie was active both on and off stage at the Oak Ridge Playhouse. He enjoyed large and small roles in some 50 plays and also served as lighting director for a number of Playhouse shows.

Charlie took the role of Otto Hahn in three staged readings of Remembering Miss Meitner, Robert Marc Friedman’s one-act play about the discovery of fission, two in 2004 and one in 2007. In all three productions, the role of Lise Meitner was played by Bonnie Nestor, whom Charlie had married in 1987 after a five-year courtship that began while Bonnie was a technical editor in the ORNL Fusion Energy Division.

Charlie was a member of the American Nuclear Society and the American Physical Society and an ardent supporter of science education. He was a man of many enthusiasms, among them hiking, baseball, music, and pie. His fine mind and lively spirit are much missed by his family and friends.