But what would I do with it?
May. 17th, 2005 07:07 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
fivemackI'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.
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.
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no subject
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.
no subject
Date: 2005-05-17 10:53 pm (UTC)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.