US Lab Finds A Faster Way To Make Californium-252, A Nuclear Isotope Worth Millions Per Gram Not Found Naturally On Earth

Photo: Technicians look into a hot cell in the Radiochemical Engineering Development Center where Cf-252 is produced. Photo credit: Carlos Jones, ORNL/U.S. Dept. of Energy via Flickr. CC BY 4.0 (no modifications). Article by Tom Hale. IFLScience – August 10, 2026.

Californium-252 is a very strange radioactive isotope. It doesn’t occur naturally on Earth, it furiously spits out neutrons, and it’s notoriously expensive to produce. Outside of Russia, virtually all known stocks of californium-252 (Cf-252) come from one place – Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee — and researchers there have just announced a new way to produce it. […]

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