OAK RIDGE, Tenn. Nuclear chemist Clarice Phelps of Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL) is recognized as part of the team behind tennessine, element 117. She is widely acknowledged as the first Black woman involved in the discovery of a new element. kvia

Phelps’s contribution was in preparing the target material. She purified berkelium into a film, a painstaking process that took months. Collaborators in Germany and Russia then bombarded it with calcium for months. ktvz

The element was named tennessine in recognition of the Tennessee institutions that laid the groundwork. The work was a combined effort of ORNL, the University of Tennessee and Vanderbilt University. Tennessine completes the seventh row of the periodic table and the halogen column. ktvz.com +2

The element has no practical use yet. Phelps told NPR as much, though such research aims eventually to find a superheavy element stable enough to provide new avenues for fuel and energy sources and to offer insight into the Big Bang. kvia