Lætitia H. Delmau, a distinguished researcher and radiochemist at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, has received the 2024 Glenn T. Seaborg Actinide Separations Award.
Delmau was presented with the award May 15 at the 47th Actinide Separations Conference in Petaluma, California. The annual award honors U.S. scientists and engineers who have made outstanding and lasting contributions to the development and application of actinide separations process and methodology. Actinides are the series of 15 metallic elements from 89, oractinium, to 103, lawrencium, on the periodic table. They are challenging to separate, not only because they are radioactive, but also because the heavier actinides are extremely unstable and must be created, since they do not occur in nature.
Jeff Delashmitt of the Chemical Sciences Division in ORNL’s Physical Science Directorate, who nominated Delmau for the Seaborg Actinide Separations Award, said that although Delmau doesn’t often promote her own work, it’s “significant and important.”
“Behind the scenes, she is a major driver of some of ORNL’s largest and most prestigious isotope programs,” Delashmitt said. “Through her research, method development and actinide separation protocols, she is pushing the science forward in real-world isotope processing.”
Delmau’s own accomplishments in the field are many. The process she helped develop to remove cesium-137 from high-level waste at the Savannah River Site was implemented and is still used today. Delmau received the DOE Secretary’s Achievement Awards in 2013 as part of the Salt Waste Disposal Technologies Team, and she was part of the Critical Material Institute and the Fuel Cycle Research and Development Program, orSTAAR, focusing on separations, solvent extraction or ion exchange. She received a second DOE Secretary’s Achievement Award in 2022, as part of the Mars 2020 Perseverance Rover Radioisotope Power Systems Team.
Behind the scenes, she is a major driver of some of ORNL’s largest and most prestigious isotope programs. Through her research, method development and actinide separation protocols, she is pushing the science forward in real-world isotope processing. - Jeff Delashmitt
Delmau joined ORNL in 1997 as a postdoctoral researcher and was hired into the Chemical Services Division of the Physical Science Directorate in 2000. In 2014, she moved to the Radioisotope Science and Technology Division of what is now the Isotope Science and Engineering Directorate.
Within the past 10 years, Delmau has developed new processes for multiple isotopes, including californium, neptunium/plutonium and promethium – the latter of which made ORNL the sole supplier of Pm-147 worldwide. Delmau has continued to optimize these processes, ultimately producing an extremely high-purity batch of promethium that was used by her colleagues in the Chemical Sciences Division for EXAFS studies – resulting in a paper published in May 2024 in the journal Nature.
Delmau has written 64 scientific papers published in peer-reviewed journals and holds seven patents. She holds a master’s degree in chemical engineering and a post-master’s degree in radiochemistry, both from the Ecole Supérieure de Physique et de Chimie Industrielles, or ESPCI, de la ville de Paris, and a doctorate in physical chemistry from Louis Pasteur University in Strasbourg, France.
UT-Battelle manages ORNL for the Department of Energy’s Office of Science, the single largest supporter of basic research in the physical sciences in the United States. The Office of Science is working to address some of the most pressing challenges of our time. For more information, please visit energy.gov/science.
Read more: Delmau named 2024 recipient of national Seaborg Actinide Separations Award | ORNL
