Collins’ 60-year career in isotopes centered on solving challenges

In the summer of 1965, Emory Collins saw a notice on a bulletin board at the University of Tennessee asking for chemical engineers to help start up a new radiochemical processing plant.

Collins, a graduate student at the University of Tennessee in chemical engineering, had planned to take a job at a major chemical company, but the notice intrigued him.

He called the number, interviewed for a job - and so began a six-decade career at ORNL that put him in the center of isotope production and nuclear fuel cycle R&D and gave him the opportunity to see the world.

Today, as the lab's longest full-time employee, he's still going strong.

New facility, new career

An Alabama native, Collins had an undergraduate degree from Auburn University in chemical engineering, a major he chose based on a high-school aptitude for chemistry and math. He worked in the research department of a large international company in Texas before enrolling in a five-year co-op graduate program at UT.

That's how he ended up, on a summer day, interviewing at Kingston's City Hall with Bob Brooksbank, who was both the city mayor and a section chief at ORNL. Brooksbank was hiring for a new plant that would align with Nobel Prize laureate Glenn Seaborg's ideas for large-scale transuranium element isotope production. Seaborg had envisioned a program that could provide "substantial weighable quantities, say milligrams, of berkelium, californium and einsteinium." The new facility, called the Transuranium Processing Plant was already built, with the equipment designed, but ORNL needed chemical engineers to get it up and running.

"It didn't take me long to learn nuclear material engineering," said Collins, who wrote early operational procedures with mentorship from John Bigelow and Les King. "I really got interested in the work. And it was a brand-new facility. You don't get that opportunity very often."

One of the major challenges to getting the plant operation was the equipment, which was designed to process in chloride media and corroded severely when exposed to high specific activity curium and californium. The team developed new processing methods were to overcome the issue, enabling the difficult separation of actinides from lanthanide fission products. These methods were further improved over the years.

"Those first months were tough, but we had a lot of fun and a great group of people," Collins said.

In the 1970s, Collins led the plant's Technical Group, working out improvements for the processing of various important transuranium element isotopes. After nuclear fuel cycle research began in the 1970s, he oversaw the installation of new equipment and the first two R&D campaigns to develop new methods for reprocessing commercial spent fuel.

Three Mile Island cleanup

Today, Collins is Senior Technical Advisor in the Isotope Science and Enrichment Directorate's Radioisotope Science and Technology Division. His office is a short walk from the Radiochemical Engineering Development Center (REDC), and he cites helping start up the facility and working there off and on through the years as one of the highlights of his career so far.

Another career highlight was the opportunity to work on the cleanup of the Three Mile Island nuclear accident.

On March 28, 1979, Pennsylvania's Three Mile Island Nuclear Generating Station experienced a partial meltdown. Contaminated water spilled into the basement and adjacent buildings, and there was concern about the environmental impact on the surrounding area.

ORNL joined other national laboratories in sending a response team to support monitoring and cleanup efforts.

"We had the expertise to help them solve the problem," Collins said.

Collins was on vacation with his family when the crisis occurred but headed to Pennsylvania as soon as he was back. Initially, he tested samples from the air to see if iodine-131 was being released into the atmosphere. He and a Nuclear Regulatory Commission scientist found that only 15 curies of the 10 million curies within the reactor were released.

"Everybody was afraid the iodine was going to go up out of the reactor and fall onto the grass, and the cows would eat it, and it would accumulate in milk," he said. "That didn't happen."

A month later, the first sample of contaminated accident-generated water was sent to the TRU facility, where Collins and an ORNL team partnered with experts from Savannah River National Laboratory to develop a process, dubbed the "Submerged Demineralizer System." In 1980, it was installed underwater for shielding in the spent fuel pool, where it successfully cleaned up about 2,000 gallons of contaminated water.

"We not only cleaned the water up, we showed them how to filter debris from the cloudy water in the reactor using methods developed at ORNL," Collins said.

Collins became a member of the Technical Assistance and Advisory Group to the utility that owned the reactor and made 35 trips to Three Mile Island by the time reactor defueling and decontamination ended in 1988.

Old ORNL facility, new challenges

In 1982, Collins became site manager of the original pilot plant in Bethel Valley, then called the Radiochemical Processing Facility. Built in 1943, it processed spent fuel from the Graphite Reactor during the Manhattan Project and later developed processes and trained engineers for fuel-scale plants at Savannah River, Hanford and Idaho national labs. By the 1960s, the plant was the center of the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission's uranium-233 program, requiring specially designed equipment and methods to safely maintain the highly fissile U-233. This was a new challenge for Collins, who drew on the knowledge of his mentors and colleagues. The plant processed U-233 and solidified it as oxide for distribution and storage for the next seven years before it closed − including a ton of mixed uranium containing highly radioactive decay daughters of U-232 from a commercial reactor.

"Solidification of this material solved a great safety problem for DOE and the country," Collins said.

Isotope program, more challenges

In 1987, Collins headed the Pilot Plant Section, which included the TRU facility and the Thorium Uranium Recycle Facility (TURF) in Melton Valley. He and other senior TRU staff combined TRU and TURF to become the REDC.

The next year, when the ORNL Isotope Program was transferred into the Chemical Technology Division and the program sponsor moved to DOE's Office of Nuclear Energy, it was divided into sections. Collins oversaw the calutrons, the isotope enrichment facility at the Y-12 National Security Complex.

ORNL shut down radioisotope operations in Bethel Valley in 1989 because of insufficient funds in the national Isotope Program. The equipment survived, but operations were suspended, staff was reduced, and key people were temporarily reassigned to the REDC.

As a result of that disruption, Collins became ORNL Isotope Program Manager in 1991, also heading the Isotope Technology Section. He and colleagues spent the next six years rebuilding programs and staff at REDC, the calutron facility and Bethel Valley, developing innovative pricing and long-term contracts for calutron enrichment of stable isotopes. This allowed ORNL to overtake foreign suppliers to become the major global supplier of thallium-203 for three years.

The 1989 Mark-42 project, for which the REDC processed targets irradiated at Savannah River to recover actinide element isotopes for DOE Office of Defense research, provided funding to keep the REDC doors open during a lean decade while the construction of HFIR was being funded. Those targets are again being processed at REDC. Groundwork for the current plutonium-238 and actinium-225 programs began in the 1990s.

Also in the 1990s, Collins and colleague Saed Mirzadeh, a now-retired distinguished staff scientist and ORNL Corporate Fellow, developed a process for enriching technetium-99m, an isotope widely used in medical diagnostics.

They took on the task after the shutdown of Tc-99m production site in New York that had provided one-third of the world's supply. One challenge of making the isotope for patient use was its short half-life; it lasted only about two weeks before radioactive decay started.

Collins and Mirzadeh improved the enrichment process for Tc-99m and also developed a method for reconcentrating the Tc-99m after decay began. They got buy-in from an industry partner, then patented and published several papers on their work, which ultimately won them an R&D 100 Award. As the generator system advanced through clinical trials and neared FDA approval, the industry partner withdrew, effectively ending the project. Still, Tc-99m remains in demand - and Collins' favorite isotope.

"We saw a need and came up with a solution," he said.

Applying his experiences

About the same time, Collins provided technical consultation for the DOE team overseeing construction of the U.S. mixed oxide fuel plant at the Savannah River Site, as part of the START II treaty with Russia to jointly dispose of part of their weapons-grade plutonium. After the DOE oversight program ended in 2006, Collins continued consulting with the proposed operator, working to get licensing approval. Through collaboration with the French and Russian participants, Collins learned industrial-scale reprocessing technologies and visited plants in France and Russia.

In 1999, he began leading the ORNL team in fuel processing R&D at the REDC and eventually served as U.S. representative to the Paris, France-based Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) Nuclear Energy expert group on fuel cycle chemistry. He still participates and is generally known as a strong proponent of closing the fuel cycle in the United States.

In the 2000s, he continued to innovate methods for producing radioisotopes, including californium-252, plutonium-238 and palladium-103.

In his storied career, Collins' only lament is for what he sees as missed opportunities: the closure of the calutrons at Y-12 for stable isotope production, the loss of a potential stable isotope enrichment plant in Oak Ridge, the delay in closing the nuclear fuel cycle, and slow progress toward other goals.

But his experiences gave him a depth of knowledge, which he now shares with his colleagues. As senior technical adviser, Collins meets often with staff about strategies for Cf-252, Pu-238 and various other isotopes as well as methods of processing and production.

"I try to apply my own experiences to problems I've seen before," said Collins, who lives in Farragut with his wife of 70 years, Dorothy, with whom he has three grown children and two granddaughters. "Working to solve challenging problems I can help with is always satisfying and keeps my mind sharp. I hope to continue as long as my family and I stay healthy."

UT-Battelle manages ORNL for DOE'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. − Kristi Bumpus and Jason Ellis