Neff was born in
Lake Oswego, Oregon on September 25, 1943. He attended
Stanford University. As a post-doc, he was an assistant to American Physical Society President
Wolfgang "Pief" Panofsky and helped write legislation that created the
US Department of Energy. He went on to become a professor of
physics at the
Massachusetts Institute of Technology during the 1990s. Neff is credited with dreaming up the
Megatons to Megawatts Program and selling the idea to the governments of the USA and post-Soviet Russia. Under the program, Russia dismantled many of its nuclear warheads and sold the diluted
uranium to the USA to power nuclear reactors. The program solved the problem of how to shrink the USSR's large nuclear weapons stockpile and keep weapons-grade uranium from being sold to America's enemies. He was a fellow of the
American Physical Society. He died on July 11, 2024, at the age of 80. == References ==