In cooperation with CEN‐Grenoble we developed a high temperature oven for the production of beams from rare and expensive nickel isotopes (62Ni and64Ni) with an electron cyclotron resonance (ECR) ion source Caprice‐14 GHz. For the first time, nickel has been produced in this way. For an experiment at the Unilac we have provided a stable Ni9+beam for 40 days with a mean intensity of 25e&mgr;A. The nickel consumption was a few mg per hour and ten ovens have been used for that period. Surprising and promising results were obtained with this oven for the production of uranium beams by using UO2samples. These results are compared with the ‘‘plasma heating’’ method. Complementary investigations about the already studied ‘‘sputtering’’ method are also presented. ©1996 American Institute of Physics.