Oak Ridge National Laboratory
08/21/2024 | News release | Archived content
Jeremiah Sewell: ‘Doors’ led to fulfilling career in centrifuge, operations
August 21, 2024
Jeremiah Sewell leads the Stable Isotope Production Facility Demonstration group. Credit: ORNL, U.S. Dept. of Energy
When Jeremiah Sewell thinks about how he ended up at Oak Ridge National Laboratory, building a new team to support world-changing work, he thinks about doors.
"We have a saying in our house that we preach to our kids: You don't close doors," said Sewell, who leads the Stable Isotope Production Facility Demonstration group in the lab's Isotope Science and Engineering Directorate's Enrichment Science and Engineering Division, or ESED. "I just step through doors when the opportunity arises."
The door into ORNL led Sewell to the opportunity to put together a team from scratch to provide support for the new facility that will make an isotope used in lung imaging. That isotope, xenon-129, quite literally could save people's lives.
But the doors he'd walked through during a diverse, 25-year career gave him the skills he needed to take on that challenge.
Sewell came to ORNL in 2022 from the Y-12 National Security Complex, initially as a logistics coordinator for manufacturing. It was a different type of job from the operations positions that had underpinned his career, but he was recruited by a former coworker who knew leadership wanted to bring some operational rigor to the program and thought Sewell's skills would be a good fit.
Sewell really wasn't looking to leave Y-12, but the opportunity seemed too good to pass up. He applied, got the job, and enjoyed the work. It also positioned him for the next opportunity, his current job that, he said, is perfectly aligned with his resume.
"Taking this group leader position has reminded me how much I really just love operations," Sewell said. "I was happy with the other job, but I didn't realize how much I missed operations."
Sewell grew up in Texas but attended high school in Hawkins County, Tennessee. He and wife Sarenda married right after high school, and he joined the U.S. Navy immediately afterward. following. He spent more than eight years in the Navy's nuclear power program, including operating and maintaining the nuclear propulsion plant aboard a ballistic missile submarine, the USS West Virginia.
"The Navy really taught me the importance of knowledge, of fundamentally knowing what you're doing and why you're doing it, not just doing something by rote because a procedure tells you to do it," Sewell said. "While the Navy nuclear power program is super-hardcore on compliance and doing everything as written, there's also this questioning attitude culture that is fostered there."
After the Navy, Sewell spent 14 years in New Mexico working for Urenco USA, a subsidiary of an international commercial centrifuge enrichment company. There he supported the construction, commissioning, start-up and operation of the National Enrichment Facility, the only commercial gas centrifuge uranium enrichment facility in the United States. During that time, as he progressed from operator to management, he earned a Bachelor of Science in Applied Science and Technology degree in nuclear engineering technology and a Master of Business Administration degree in operations management.
In 2020, the call of the familiar mountains and rivers brought the Sewells back to East Tennessee, a stark contrast to the living desert of Southeast New Mexico. It didn't hurt that it was also closer to family and hometown friends. Sewell said he looked at job postings for ORNL, but none seemed to be a good fit. Instead, he took a shift technical adviser job in Special Materials Operations at Y-12, which he enjoyed. Sarenda, who has nuclear materials recycling experience, also found work at Y-12, in disciplined operations.
"I really did look at the lab − but it's a science lab," Sewell said. "Coming from industry, you never feel like you're qualified. Now that I'm on the inside, I have a better understanding of the areas where my background and experience fit and are valuable. I'm never going to be a researcher, but I can help. I can support."
As leader for the new Stable Isotope Production Facility Demonstration group in ESED, Sewell had the opportunity to build his own team over the past year, working with Human Resources to create job descriptions. His team will help create and support a small pilot facility that will use centrifuge to produce xenon-129, a medical isotope used for lung imaging.
"Getting to hire a team from the ground up is fairly unique, and very exciting; I'd never gotten to do that before," Sewell said. "I knew that there's not a big pool of people in the U.S. with centrifuge operations experience, so I went for diversity of skill sets.
"This is a unique opportunity; we don't quite know the full scope of everything we'll be doing. One of the things I learned from leadership courses is that you can't be everything for everybody, so you need to build a team around you that can be a complete unit, to fill all those gaps."
Sewell's team includes one person with more than 15 years of experience operating a commercial gas centrifuge facility. But it also includes a pharmacist, an electronics technician and people with experience with non-gas centrifuges, Navy nuclear power, and operations and production at ORNL and other national labs.
I wanted to do something that was going to make a difference. Xenon is a really cool thing - the imaging improvements it provides are lifechanging for some people. One of my technicians got emotional when he found out what xenon was used for because his mother had actually lost a lung to disease. Another person on my team wanted to work here because they think centrifuges are just the coolest thing on the planet. You could see the excitement. That was part of the holistic approach to hiring candidates: them seeing the value of the mission.
- Jeremiah Sewell, group leader of the Stable Isotope Production Facility Demonstration group at ORNL
"We have a wide spectrum," Sewell said. "We were looking to build a team with a broad skill set who will get along - and we have. Hopefully, we can take on any obstacle that comes at us, that we didn't foresee, or expand our scope as needed to make the mission successful."
Sewell said he also looked for team members who, like him, would feel personally invested in the project's success.
"I wanted to do something that was going to make a difference," he said. "Xenon is a really cool thing - the imaging improvements it provides are lifechanging for some people. One of my technicians got emotional when he found out what xenon was used for because his mother had actually lost a lung to disease. Another person on my team wanted to work here because they think centrifuges are just the coolest thing on the planet. You could see the excitement. That was part of the holistic approach to hiring candidates: them seeing the value of the mission."
Sewell spent an exciting and fulfilling career in a niche industry, enriching uranium, and is quick to say he believes in the missions of that work: peaceful nuclear power, energy diversity, sustainability. But being involved in the production of a medical isotope that can change people's health is a different kind of satisfaction, he said.
"All that I learned from uranium, I can use with Xe-129," he said. "I'm surrounded by experts in their fields, doing world-class work: inventing things, building the things they invent, and then taking them to an operational state. And I can help! I have that experience and expertise to help take us to the next level, at least from an operational and production standpoint, to take their ideas and their designs and help make something useful with them."
As group leader, he's balancing his management soft skills with the mechanical/technical problem-solving skills that initially drew him to the lab. One challenge for Sewell is that his team is in multiple locations; even with a daily meeting and monthly one-on-ones, "I don't get to see the team as much as I want," he said. "My team is my top priority. My people are my No. 1 asset. But actually demonstrating that has been challenging at times."
Another challenge is writing training and procedures that will be useful for the team working in a new space.
"The philosophy I've had for this whole group since the beginning is 'excellence beyond compliance,'" Sewell said. "If you only understand the procedure, you have to learn something new every time you move to a new platform. But if you understand the theory behind it, you can go anywhere and be effective immediately."
Long-term, he hopes this preparation will mean a seamless transition when the Stable Isotope Production Facility moves from a demonstration program to full-scale production.
"My vision is that our group is the experts of that facility," Sewell said. "We're giving feedback to the future design. We're vital to bridging that gap."
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.