Tina Nenoff
Solving Problems Together
February / March 06
Volume 4 Number 1
Take a moment to imagine the future. What do you see? A world without crime. A world without war, without poverty. Environmentally sound solutions to the looming energy crisis. Cleaner fuels—€¦better ways to treat toxic waste—€¦more efficient energy processes.
But how do we get there? How do we move from simply dreaming, thinking and planning our future to actually living it?
Tina Nenoff has one answer. She is a Distinguished Member of the Technical Staff at Sandia National Laboratories and a materials chemist in the Chemical and Biological Systems Department. She is one of a group of innovators working on the front lines of the push to imagine a better tomorrow through the application of basic science.
At age 40, Nenoff has filed seven U.S. patents and has seven applications pending. Her work has been nationally recognized, first as part of a team that won a 1996 R&D 100 Award; in 2001 as the recipient of the New Mexico YWCA's "Women on the Move" award, and again in 2003 as the recipient of Rep. Heather Wilson's (R-N.M.) "Women's History Month" award.
"For innovation to happen, it's really important to work as a team and to work across the disciplines," Nenoff says. "Here at Sandia, I'm really comfortable going to different departments to discuss solutions to problems. What happens when you get people from different fields working together is that people bring with them their own notebook of knowledge, so to speak. We all have years of experience solving different problems and working in various fields, and we've catalogued that knowledge in our heads. The more people you have working on a problem, the more creative your solutions are going to be."
Nenoff grew up in Washington Township, N.J. "Science always came easy to me," she says, "and I had a spectacular high school chemistry teacher. She really supported my interest in studying chemistry." She is a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, with a degree in chemistry. Her honors advisor was none other than Dr. Allan G. MacDiarmid, the recipient of the 2000 Nobel Prize in chemistry for the discovery and development of conductive polymers.
"Working in Dr. MacDiarmid's lab was a wonderful and timely experience," she says. "The work was cutting edge, the group was excited and motivated to be there and involved and I was lucky enough to be a part of that energy. Prior to that experience, I was planning to attend medical school. After working in his lab, I changed my professional course and pursued a career as a research chemist."
She earned master's and doctoral degrees in chemistry at the University of California-Santa Barbara and was hired by Sandia in 1993 where she joined a team investigating the development and use of crystalline silicotitanate (CST) ion exchangers for the cleanup of radioactive waste. The result of that teamwork was a 1996 R&D 100 Award. The award was shared by researchers from Sandia, Texas A&M University and UOP LLC, a Illinois-based company that specializes in developing and commercializing technology for license to the oil refining, petrochemical and gas processing industries.
The research team developed CST, an inorganic material that is particularly useful for separating highly radioactive cesium from other wastes. Cesium is a byproduct from the production of nuclear waste. By removing radioactive cesium molecules from a material, researchers can greatly reduce the volume of the material that must be stored as nuclear waste. Treatment of this waste by the CST separator reduces by a factor of 600 the volume of highly radioactive material that must be encapsulated in glass or ceramics for long-term disposal.
"It really means a lot to me to work on projects that have a positive impact on a national level," Nenoff says. "I'm fortunate to be able to do that at Sandia, where we have not only the facilities and talent to make a difference, but also the mandate." Her work on CSTs led her to a related project to analyze new materials for use in radioactive waste cleanup. Her team created a new class of molecular sieves that work to capture radioactive chemicals mixed into a sea of hazardous waste. These new microporous materials, called Sandia Octahedral Molecular Sieves (SOMS), can be used to purify industrial processes or waste streams, filter out valuable chemicals for reuse or help clean up the millions of gallons of radioactive waste produced at our nation's nuclear weapons production facilities.
"The research I began evolved into six years of really amazing work," Nenoff says, resulting in a new class of materials, several patents and a number of national publications. "Good research never dies" she says. "It evolves. You leverage that knowledge over time into new discoveries."
Her work developing new materials for nuclear waste cleanup eventually led her to explore two new areas of research in ionic conductors, one on conductivity experiments for solid oxide fuel cells and the other developing membranes that can be used to produce hydrogen without carbon dioxide, or greenhouse gas, emissions. Her current research is directed toward developing zeolite thin-film membranes for gas separations in hydrogen fuel production, work that could take us one step closer to the use of hydrogen as a viable source of clean fuel.
Leslie Britt is a writer for Technically Write, assigned to Sandia National Laboratories.
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