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Richard T. Mayes

Senior R&D Staff Member and Group Leader, Fuel Cycle Technology Group

Richard Mayes leads the Fuel Cycle Chemical Technology Group at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, overseeing a research and development portfolio focused advanced nuclear fuel recycling and separations approaches to advance the technology readiness level from benchtop to engineering scale.

His robust career at ORNL has focused on adjacent lanthanide separations, radioisotope production, and structure-property relationships of f-block elements. He has served in several R&D staff and leadership roles, where he led the effort to reestablish domestic Promethium-147 production, and studied the extraction of co-produced radioisotopes and fission product utility. 

He is an active member of the American Chemical Society and served as the 2024 chair of the organization’s East Tennessee Section. He also serves as an associate editor in sustainable process engineering for Frontiers in Chemical Engineering.