All Things Nuclear
James C. Warf was a Group Leader on the Manhattan Project from 1942 to 1947. He also worked at the University of Chicago and Oak Ridge. He holds patents on extraction techniques which evolved into the PUREX process for separation of plutonium. Dr. Warf was a founding member of a group which coalesced into the Federation of American Scientists. After a year s research on a Guggenheim Fellowship in Switzerland, he went in 1948 to the University of Southern California where was a Professor of Chemistry. He was a consultant at Jet Propulsion Laboratory, working on a life-detection system of the Viking probes to Mars. He has testified at hearings by Congressional subcommittees concerning the N Reactor and the proposed atomic laser isotope separation facility. And, he has been a Research Associate, in the Program on Nuclear Energy, at the University of California, Santa Cruz, and a chair of the Southern California Federation of Scientists. In 1994 he traveled to Kazakhstan with a team investigating the former Soviet nuclear warhead test sites for health problems resulting from radioactive fallout. In 1996, for the Department of Energy, he inspected the Experimental Breeder Reactor in Idaho and its proposed system of processing spent fuel. He has been a consultant at Los Angeles County USC Hospital s nuclear medicine division regarding radioactive isotopes of platinum used in cancer research. He is now is Professor Emeritus at the University of Southern California, and recently received the university s Distinguished Emeritus Professor award.