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Asked by mrbeast to Rebecca on 31 May 2024.
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Rebecca Witton answered on 31 May 2024:
hi! i’ve worked with all of them but the most valuable is iridium, which is currently priced at ~5000$ per 30g! Iridium is typically used in the fuel cell industry to create hydrogen and power cars with fuel cells instead of petrol or diesel
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Comments
Andrew M commented on :
Although I mostly work with the precious metals platinum, palladium and rhodium the most valuable metal I’ve worked was at university and isn’t precious at all.
The organic metal TTF-TCNQ is almost totally unremarkable to look at and you certainly couldn’t make jewellery out of it but it is fascinating as a non-metal metal (or at least a compound with metal-like properties). It’s currently on sale at £269 per g, more even than prettier, more durable and far more useful gold, platinum or iridium. Needless to say I was allowed very, very little of it. Pity the experiment failed, as did the one where I tried to create and use graphene instead.
Luke commented on :
Nothing exciting, but gold plating is used a lot for computers as it’s a very good conductor and it’s still one of the highest £/kg precious metals around.
In fusion energy, probably the metal whose scarcity is most concerning though is Lithium. It’s commonly used for rechargeable batteries, and though it’s not currently priced per kg all that much compared to some other precious metals, it will be required in large quantities for breeding tritium (hydrogen-3) in fusion power plants. This process is necessary for viable fusion energy as tritium is extremely short-lived, tricky to handle, and what stockpiles exist are largely used in nuclear weapons.
I’ve done a lot of work on breeder blanket designs that aim to mitigate this problem by breeding the tritium fuel in the power plant using high energy neutrons produced by the fusion reaction, but they will require lithium as the breeder material. I suspect as fusion energy develops, it will drive up the price of lithium accordingly.
Hannah commented on :
I did a little bit of work using gold nanoparticles (tiny, tiny bits of gold, around 0.000,000,001m) designing point of care biosensors to test for different diseases, a bit like the covid lateral flow tests (although they didn’t use gold!).