Kaara Patton is a Sr. Production Engineer supporting the Californium-252 program.
Kaara first arrived to ORNL as a SULI summer student in 2010 analyzing the flow of processing radioactive waste for the ITER project. She returned in January 2011 working for Areva Federal Services assisting in research on capture of volatile fission products released during treatment of used nuclear fuels. She continued to support projects in the Process Engineering Research (PER) group while completing her master’s degree in chemical engineering. She worked as a post-master’s student through ORAU in PER assisting in several uranium processing unit operations for non-proliferation research until September 2015.
From September 2015 to January 2019, she worked at the Y-12 National Security Complex in the Development organization supporting uranium and lithium processing research for their facility modernization, along with other special research efforts. This experience further honed her materials and processing knowledge
Kaara returned to ORNL in 2019 to work at the Radiochemical Engineering Development Center (REDC). She was able to continue working with uranium for certain customers as well as join the NASA Pu-238 production team, studying oxide production and pellet fabrication from previous subject matter experts. She became group leader in April 2022, and the team moved to the new Isotope Processing and Manufacturing Division in June 2022. She served in this role until July 2026, when she became a production engineer for Cf-252.