CORVALLIS, Oregon — Oregon State University says researchers in its College of Science have patented a more eco-friendly way to separate zirconium from hafnium, two metals that, in their pure forms, underpin both the semiconductor and nuclear energy industries. The work was announced by the university on February 12, 2026, and published in the Journal of the American Chemical Society. It was led by graduate research assistant Alex Roseborough and May Nyman, professor of chemistry.
Zirconium and hafnium are chemically so similar that the mineral zirconium silicate (ZrSiO4), commonly known as zircon, almost always carries trace amounts of hafnium. Zircon mining is the principal economic source of both elements.
Getting one cleanly away from the other, however, is a prerequisite for microelectronics and nuclear reactors, and that is where the difficulty bites. In the United States, only two facilities are equipped to perform the separation on an industrial scale: ATI Specialty Alloys & Components in Albany, Oregon, and Westinghouse Electric in Ogden, Utah. Each uses millions of pounds of flammable organic solvent every year.
Their liquid-liquid extraction process, the current state of the art, is energy intensive, and roughly 4% of the solvent is lost to the air as noxious pollution.
Precipitation instead of solvent
The OSU approach swaps that for precipitation, in which dissolved ions of opposite charge attract each other and form an insoluble solid. The aqueous solution combines natural zirconium, with its few percentage points of hafnium impurity, thiocyanate ligands that bind to the hafnium and zirconium ions, and choline, an inexpensive, nontoxic chemical commonly used as a food additive. The result is a precipitation of hafnium-rich species.
The detail that matters is the separation factor, a measure of a process’s ability to separate two components. A value greater than one means separation is possible, and higher numbers are better.
The industry standard for zirconium-hafnium separation sits between six and seven. The OSU process produced a top score of 33. Nyman, the Terence Bradshaw Chemistry Professor at Oregon State, said the study describes in atomic-level detail how the separation works and how precipitation-based separations can compete with solvent extraction.
She added that questions remain to be answered and milestones to be achieved, but called the findings exciting and impactful, particularly as society must move toward more carbon-free and high-density electricity generation, including nuclear energy. Also contributing to the study were OSU researchers Doctor Stephen, Jack McLaughlin, Lev Zakharov, George Donkor-Gyami and Pere Miró.
The U.S. Department of Energy and the Murdock Charitable Trust supported the research. Roseborough is now a metallurgist with the department’s National Energy Technology Laboratory. The OSU College of Science, one of the largest academic units at the university, has seven departments and 12 pre-professional programs.
What to watch next is whether the patented chemistry can be scaled from a separation factor of 33 in the lab to the throughput the two American plants currently deliver — the gap between a promising ligand system and an industrial process is, as ever, where the engineering lives.
