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.
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timeasmymeasure
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Date: 2005-05-17 10:48 pm (UTC)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.