Thomas Pigford, ChE 43, a nuclear engineer who pushed for stronger safety standards for nuclear reactors, died Feb. 28 at his home in Oakland, Calif. He was 87 years old.
Dr. Pigford, professor emeritus and founding chair of the department of nuclear engineering at the University of California, Berkeley, served on the 12-member presidential commission that investigated the 1979 accident at the Three Mile Island power plant in Pennsylvania. He later served on the Secretary of Energy’s expert consultant group that evaluated the 1986 disaster at the Chernobyl plant in the Ukraine.
His daughter, Julie Pigford Earnest, told Berkeley media, “My father spoke truth to power, which gained him respect from both proponents and opponents of the nuclear power industry. Everything he said or did was based on analysis of the data and not on politics or emotion. That said, he was also insightful about the impact of politics on scientific decisions and had a sense of how human error and concerns contribute to scientific policy.”
Dr. Pigford was born in Meridian, Miss. His studies at MIT were interrupted by service in the Navy during World War II. He earned master’s and doctoral degrees from MIT, where he became an associate professor of nuclear and chemical engineering, helped launch the graduate program in nuclear engineering and served two years as director of its graduate school of engineering practice at Oak Ridge, Tenn.
He was a founding staff member of the General Atomic laboratory in La Jolla, Calif., before joining Berkeley as a full professor in 1959.
According to an article on the Berkeley Web site, Dr. Pigford led a research program at the university to develop means for predicting long-term behavior of radioactive and chemical waste that resulted in the design of underground radioactive waste repositories in the United States and abroad. He retired from the university in 1991.
Dr. Pigford was inducted into the Georgia Tech Engineering Hall of Fame in 1995.
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