But what would I do with it?

[fivemack]

I've just discovered the vendor 'emovendo' on ebay.

He sells Weird Metals; for example, eleven ounces of 99.9%-pure erbium. There are a few other vendors; put in "elementname element" in the box and you'll get a fair number of hits for most reasonable materials (though not thorium or uranium; I guess ebay has a blanket 'no radioactives').

As someone who learned the periodic table aged nine to while away a lazy Sunday afternoon, I'm sorely tempted. It even says "use some of the pieces for experiments and some for display".

But what experiments can one sensibly do with common-to-moderately-odd household equipment, chemicals obtainable without being arrested on assumption of amphetamine synthesis, and three ounces of solid erbium?

A few oddities: rhenium is surprisingly cheap for an element that near platinum, though maybe I remember its rarity as exaggerated in, umm, the Doc Smith novel with the metal dowser and the planet of flying superalloy-clawed tiger-monsters. Rhodium is absurdly expensive (forty quid per gram, so say 4x gold), ruthenium the cheapest of the platinum-groups, with a factor ten between them.

Even-Z rare earths are no more expensive than lead in sufficient bulk: a quarter-pound of neodymium is twenty quid. Scandium is more expensive per-gram than gold despite being five thousand times as abundant in Earth's crust, basically because there's so little demand for it.

Comments

[sraun]

You reminded me of one of my 'if I ever win the lottery' desires - I want one of these! I'm not certain I'd build the table myself - I might commission my father to build it for me - but it would be an awful lot of fun collecting the elements...

[womble2.livejournal.com]

Scandium is more expensive per-gram than gold despite being five thousand times as abundant in Earth's crust, basically because there's so little demand for it.

Er... that's not how I remember market prices working. I would guess the extraction process is less efficient.

[ewx.livejournal.com]

Low demand means there'd not be an adequate return on spending lots of money on an efficient bulk processing mechanism, presumably.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Indeed.

Tim Worstall, who posts on sci.chem from time to time, owns about half of the world scandium market. A few years back, he posted

"Presently extraction methods are small scale , almost lab bench affairs. Build a larger factory, using industrial rather than lab bench processes : what do you get ? Economies of scale. Volume produced goes up, price goes down. Simple really. Our plant will halve the cost of scandium."; later he appeared to be having a little trouble finding $5 million to build the plant.

If you want an ounce, ebay charges $10 the gram.

If you had found a use for ten tonnes - say, an improved ceramic piston-liner requiring a quarter-gram of scandium per piston would allow some other part of every car engine Toyota builds to be built for a thousand yen less - getting hold of that would take a long while (for factories aren't built overnight), but would not cost anything like $100 million.

If the Soviet military (who did the research that pointed out that scandium was a perfect alloying material for aluminum) had decided that pure scandium was enough better than titanium for submarine hulls to be worth the effort of prospecting, mining, refining and forging, I doubt scandium would cost very much more than aerospace titanium alloys.

[fivemack.livejournal.com]

Dr Worstall's Low Hanging Fruit Company (http://timworstall.typepad.com/lhfc/) has the useful note

Current world production of scandium oxide is in the 2,000 kg per year range. Current consumption is in the 5,000 kg per year range, and growing quickly. The balance is met from Soviet era stocks. Obviously these will run out at some point, a few years hence.

[kaet.livejournal.com]

The main industrial hazard with rare earths is their extreme boringness, and an inability to tell them apart, unfortuntaely. Like Ant and Dec.

The two answers are usually, heat it up till it oxidises (you might need to be careful to get the right oxide). Many turn interesting colours, and you can then add them to glass to make it that colour (most pigments other than oxides don't withstand this process, and most oxides of mundane elements are boring colours).

The other thing you can do with them (which I suppose is as a result of similar properties) is use them in interesting lasers, lights, etc. It would be somewhat of an achievement for a home experimenter to make an Erbium-doped Yttrium Aluminium Garnet laser, but not an impossible one. Unfortunately it's mid infra-red, so would excel again in that rare earth element property of boringness.

You can almost certainly use it to do interesting stuff in any nuclear reactors you have to hand.

I think making it a nice shade of pink might be a good option, :).

Much better going for D block or even the jolly exciting S and P block elements, I think. :).

The only factoid I know concerning Erbium is that it's one of the four elements named after the village of Ytterby (http://www.fallingrain.com/world/SW/26/Ytterby.html) in Sweden. Which means that's definately a place I'll visit one day, if I get the time, (like Fray Bentos with its pie museum, in Uraguay). Ytrium, Yterbium, Erbium and Terbium. It has rocks full of rare earths.

[ceb.livejournal.com]

Unfortunately it's mid infra-red> you can do magic frequency-doubling to make it more exciting. Our YAG ran at c. 355nm (and made a really irritating 3Hz clicky noise).