May 6, 2021

For years Brenda Smith found fulfillment working with nuclear batteries, a topic she’s been researching as a chemist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

But she gets a different kind of charge out of her work in a new position in the lab’s Stable Isotope Research, Development, and Production Section.

In Stable Isotopes, Smith is one of several people concurrently researching the thermophysical properties of feedstock gas. Their research will support computational researchers who are designing processes to separate isotopes.

“They want to know how the gas is going to behave during the isotope separation process,” Smith said.