How We Make Every Element
It is a well known fact that Canada is merely three mining companies in a trench coat pretending to be a developed economy. In fact “Canadian” companies operate mines all over the world, from the mudpits of the Congo to the deserts of Chile, from the Nunavut tundras to the jungles of Papua New Guinea. If you got rocks you’d better believe you are going to get some leafs in suits knocking down your door interested in tearing them out of the ground.
In fact there are enough mining companies in Canada that I even interviewed for a programing internship at a Quebec city based company that made software solely for use by mining companies. That is how far down this rabbit hole can go. Let’s see how many we got for the elements from H to U.
Hydrogen, Nitrogen, Oxygen
Hydrogen can be made through the electrolysis of water (basically connecting a battery to water and passing a current through it) which splits the hydrogen and oxygen in the water molecule into both elemental gases (2*H2O -> 2*H2 + O2). The issue is how to separate them. Xebec Adsorption (TSE:XBC) is a gas purification equipment manufacturing company. Besides Hydrogen, their equipment can be used to collect renewable natural gas from landfills or to purify atmospheric Nitrogen or Oxygen
Note: The purpose of listing is not investment advice, rather it is to provide an example of a company producing every element. In fact I actively advise against investing in any of the companies you see here unless you know what you are doing. In fact Xebec seems to have gone bankrupt since I originally wrote this up. An inspiration behind making this was I wondered if I could find a company that made every element that was listed on a stock exchange so Xebec was chosen mostly because it covered gases which obviously don’t need to be made but are instead harvested from the environment. Take their bankruptcy as a good warning to not use this as investment advice.
Helium
Now Xebec does offer specialized equipment that can recover Helium too. Helium is crucial to some industrial purposes, but we’ve mostly been using it to make stretchy plastic go up because about 100 years ago the US government thought blimps were going to be absolutely crucial to militaries going forward so they acquired a strategic reserve and have been selling it gradually in embarrassment ever since.
As people have realized the supplies have been running thin the price has been climbing. It is generally recovered alongside natural gas so fracking probably means we won’t run out of it that soon but it does mean that it will probably be economical to attempt to recover it more often rather than treating it as a waste product. Some companies even specialize in Helium production, like American Helium (TSX-V: AHE) , headquartered in Vancouver, and Royal Helium (TSX-V: RHC) seems to be setting up production in Saskatchewan. Desert Mountain Energy Corp (TSX-V:DME) which is also Vancouver based is going to be operating in Arizona, and that name seems to suggest that a lot of smaller energy companies are pivoting in this direction since the technologies for extraction are largely the same. It remains to be seen if this will be a profitable move for them, especially since all sorts of gas producers like Russia and Qatar around the world are going to be ramping up production.
Lithium
We finally get to something which is actually in a rock rather than merely a gas trapped in rocks. Lithium is crucial for producing batteries for electric vehicles. Lithium Americas (TSE:LAC) is the 8th largest lithium mining company in the world with operations in Nevada and Argentina. The Nevada Thacker Pass mine has a lifespan of 46 years and is 100% owned by them so unlike the helium companies this isn’t some fly by night operation.
Beryllium
Beryllium is found in Emeralds alongside Aluminum and Silicates. As a metal it is toxic but it has specialized use in Copper Beryllium alloys (CuBe) which is useful as a non-sparking metal contact for environments where there is explosion risk. On its own, it is used in the Aerospace industry due to being lightweight (its only got 4 protons and 5 neutrons guys!). Its also a component in CANDU nuclear reactors. Generally it is too expensive in metal form to have widespread production and uses. There was an emerald mining company you could invest in called Fura Gems on the TSX venture but they went private in October of 2020.
Boron
Most Boron comes from a Turkish state owned mining company, with its main competitor being Anglo-Australian Rio Tinto Group (NYSE:RIO) in a Californian mine in a town literally called Boron, so I guess we don’t got this one boys, Australia rock-blocked us.
Carbon
Carbon comes in two main allotropes (which means different ways the atoms are arranged to form materials with different properties): graphite and diamonds. Graphite is used in Lithium-ion batteries (but it doesn’t use all that much since its just the anodes which means one of the ends where the electricity passes through) and is mined in Quebec and Ontario. The companies are all tiny though, the largest seems to be Mason Graphite (TSX-V:LLG) and I’m also going to list Canada Carbon just because I find the name amusing (TSX-V:CCB).
For diamonds I hear the dust is useful to put on blades to cut things, for mines operating in southern Africa you got Lucara Diamond (TSE:LUC) and partnering with De Beers the diamond cartel in the Northwest Territories is Mountain Province Diamonds (TSE:MPVD)
Nitrogen, Phosphorus, Potassium
As I previously said Xebec manufactures equipment for producing nitrogen on-site, but one important usage of nitrogen is the production of fertilizers, and the third largest producer of nitrogen fertilizer in the world is Nutrien (TSE:NTR). They also supply phosphates and are the largest producer of Potassium in the world due to their ownership of Saskatchewan’s potash mines. Get it? Potash-ium?
Oxygen
It might be a bit late for it, but I imagine medical oxygen would have been in demand recently due to … the 2020 thing, but I don’t think Canada has got this one, so I’m going to put down Inogen (NASDAQ: INGN). Xebec does however install on-site oxygen production so you can go with that one again if you are theoretically trying to cover as many elements with the least number of companies as possible. You can do what you want. It’s not like I know why you are even reading this.
Fluorine
As a troll I’m going to go with Proctor and Gamble (NYSE: PG) since they make toothpaste. Fluorine’s main industrial use is in enriching uranium, but fluorite minerals are also used to decrease the melting point of metals, such as in steel making, and fluorine also forms Teflon when it bonds with Carbon. One of the largest and earliest sources of Fluorite found was in Newfoundland on the Burin Peninsula, which is the Newfoundland peninsula which extends towards the French islands of Saint Pierre and Miquelon, and its production recommenced in 2018 by Canada Fluorspar Inc, which is owned by Golden Gate Capital which is a San Francisco based private equity firm so no fancy letters ticker.
Neon
Neon is a noble gas so it doesn’t react with much and it is produced from the trace amounts of it in the atmosphere by this process called fractional distillation of liquidized air. The components of the atmosphere will generally evaporate or condense at different temperatures and pressures. This means pretty much anyone can make it if they have the patience, lab equipment, and energy.
Sodium, Magnesium, Sulfur
Sodium as a metal is extremely reactive and so its production and uses are highly specialized. As a compound its one of the most abundant salts on earth, as in table salt is literally Sodium Chloride (but it also contains other things in trace amounts so don’t just go around calling it that, James Isaac Neutron). The world’s largest salt producer is a German chemical company K + S Ag (ETR: SDF), which owns the American food company Morton Salt, which in turn owns the Canada Salt Company. They also produce fertilizers and are the main competitor to Nutrien as they supply Potash to Europe. They also do other mineral fertilizers like Magnesium and Sulfur. Sulfur is actually necessary for some fertilizers in Europe. Technically plants need it and we were supplying it through our power plant emissions causing acid rain, so we didn’t notice that intensive agriculture in Europe was depleting the soil of sulfur until we fixed the acid rain problem, and suddenly sulfur based fertilizers became necessary if you farmed the same land too much now that diminished acid rain was not replenishing it. Epsom salt, made of Magnesium Sulfate is one such fertilizer which covers both. They also sometimes use Calcium sulfate as Calcium is a secondary plant nutrient as well.
I have found a Magnesium miner called Western Magnesium (TSX-V:WMG)
Aluminum
Aluminum used to be incredibly expensive but now we got so much of it that we use it for everything and so it is mined in volume as opposed to trying to find a particularly concentrated source somewhere. In contrast to a lot of other elements where it’s so expensive that there isn’t all that much market demand for it, the Aluminum production system can be considered an industry onto itself rather than just some scattered companies.
Century Aluminum (NASDAQ:CENX) and Alcoa Corp (NYSE:AA) are American companies involved in the production of Aluminum. That last one attempted a hostile takeover of Alcan (Aluminum Canada) in 2007 but was rock-blocked by Rio Tinto who did a friendly takeover.
Silicon
It is course, rough, and irritating, and it gets everywhere. No I’m not talking about Rio Tinto, I’m talking about what Jimmy Neutron would call Silicon Dioxide or Silica. Sand needs to be processed before it is ready to form chemically useful silicon dioxide, so its not like you can just use the grains on a beach for chemical reactions, unless of course you don’t care if it doesn’t work very well due to impurities. Silica can then be used to make glass and silicon and then into semi-conductors. It often makes more sense to use quartz crystals directly to make silicon as that is a purer form of silica. HPQ Silicon Resources Inc (TSX-V: HPQ) does just that.
Also despite many a proverb saying that the stars in the sky are even more numerous then grains of sand on the beach, sand is a non-renewable resource, and in many places we are running out of sand suitable for making concrete for construction, which means companies run by our friends the Saudis such as Binladin group import sand. The sand they got in Saudi Arabia is too smooth and round from the wind action blowing it everywhere so they need to import water eroded sand from Australia. This is economical because if you are taking the sand from the coast of Australia to Saudi Arabia you can just load it in bulk onto ships and it is cheap enough since the weight does not contribute to transport cost so much when you can float it there in giant ships. Moving sand over land however is a bigger issue which is where a lot of the issues with supplying sand come from.
Other countries facing critical sand shortages include the likes of construction heavy India, although for them their sand supply issues mostly come from internal divisions rather than needing imports. This means they have a booming black market in sand where Indian localities try to steal river beds and beaches from each other.
Here is an anecdote as to how this non-renewable resource is managed even if you don’t usually hear about it. I was talking with the guy who re-founded the Ottawa Senators hockey team about this development he was making around an artificial lake. Turns out over the course of some decade he needed to mine out all the sand resources from the stretch of land before he got approval to build as that was the condition for the city letting him have the property, and what he was left with was a huge pit that filled with rainwater which he stocked with fish. The sand was likely hauled to a nearby aggregate cement facilities which basically looks like a giant grey-brown blob in the fields outside Ottawa on satellite pictures. There is one on the east end beyond the airport, and another in the west end between Kanata and Barrhaven. The construction supplies companies will locate around it and then all construction projects in the city will source from them. The supply of sand is tightly managed locally as carrying it from far away would make construction so much more expensive. What this means is that while sand is non-renewable, the earth itself is probably not going to run out of sand, rather areas that have lots of construction will be running out of accessible local sand. The sand market is highly location dependent. There is lots of sand, it just isn’t where we need it to be.
Sand is also used in the fracking process so many of the inland localities in the united states that frack have local sand shortages, and one of the companies supplying it is US Silica (NYSE: SLCA), so yes you can invest in literal sand. There is also a Canadian company called Athabasca Minerals. (TSX-V: AMI)
Sulfur
Sulfur is a massive component of the Oil Sands so we actually just have a bunch of it piling up in Alberta … like they literally started building pyramids out of the stuff. Suncor (TSE:SU) is the main Oil Sands stock so if there is ever a sudden need for sulfur I assume they would make bank.
Chlorine
I’m going to go with a troll answer for this one as well because it is literally just salt again: pool supplies by Pool Corp (NASDAQ:POOL). What seems unusual is that it looking at the chart the price has gone up times ten in 10 years so something is up. Don’t know what it is but there is something.
Argon
Another inert gas. Air Products and Chemicals (NYSE:APD) supplies it alongside other atmospheric gases (Argon is 0.934% of the atmosphere). The ways in which it differs from Xebec is that this seems to supply the gases themselves while Xebec manufactures equipment that is used onsite.
Potassium
PotashCorp merged with Agrium to form Nutrien in 2018 so it has already been discussed under Nitrogen for fertilizers.
Calcium
The troll answer here would be a dairy company like Saputo (TSE:SAP), but calcium carbonate is limestone and the aggregate sites which supply it in Canada seem to be owned by LafargeHolcim (SWX: LHN) which is a French-Swiss building materials company, which happens to be about 0.5% owned by Power Corp (TSE:POW) through its insanely complex structure of shell companies which amplifies its control over it as it effectively co-controls Group Brussels Lambert (EBR: GBLB) which owns 7.6% of LafargeHolcim.
Scandium, Titanium, Niobium
This is where the fun begins as we have finally reached the transition metals. Scandium is a rare earth element, which are usually produced in a single Chinese rare earth mining district in Inner Mongolia.
Rare earths aren’t actually that rare, but they are hard to extract into their pure form. Scandium is produced as a byproduct of other mining that is done in Ukraine, China, Russia, and also now the Philippines, and NioCorp (TSE:NB) is looking to start a Niobium mine and processing facility in the Elk Creek Project in Nebraska that will also be able to produce Scandium (and Titanium). They recently secured $10 million in funding in February 2021 to buy the land and mineral rights, and they have secured all the necessary federal permits. It remains to be seen if it will pan out though, as that tends to be the case with companies which haven’t even started production yet.
Vanadium
Vanadium is useful for energy storage, and so the companies that mine it also tend to get involved in that industry, such as Largo Resources (TSE:LGO) which has a subsidiary offering energy storage in addition to offering the mineral. I have to assume that since it is atomically heavier that Lithium is is better suited for long term statically placed grid storage rather than mobile charge and go vehicle storage.
Chromium
Stainless Steel is an alloy of iron and chromium. Interesting fact, Chromium in trace quantities is what makes Rubies red, if it is lacking in the chromium then the corundum mineral will be blue and thus a Sapphire. Noront Resources (TSX-V:NOT) has chromite deposits but they also have a copper, nickel, platinum, and palladium mine. KWG resources (CNSX: KWG) seems to be more active in Chromite mining specifically. For a stainless steel producer specifically there is Universal Stainless & Alloy Products Inc (NASDAQ:USAP)
Manganese
This is also used in some kinds of stainless steels, but also for aluminum alloys like beverage cans. So coke stock? How about specifically a company that bottles coke products? Coca-Cola Consolidated Inc (NASDAQ: COKE) which is 35% owned by Coca-Cola Co (NYSE:KO). For mining you can go with Manganese X Energy Corp (TSX-V:MN)
Iron
Is it ironic that Iron Man’s suit was not made out of iron? Okay so the Iron Ore Company of Canada, which operates huge open pits on Baffin Island in Nunavut as well as in Shefferfield, Quebec which is less than km from the Labrador border and it is literally surrounded by it on 3 sides while also being in the part of Quebec that is technically to the north of the part of Labrador that bulges out. So it is like part of Quebec only in the most technical sense rather than practically.
The Iron Ore Company of Canada is 58.7% owned by none other than Rio Tinto, and a further 26.2% is owned by Mitsubishi (TYO: 8058). The company itself is private and is not listed, but you can invest in it indirectly through the Labrador Iron Ore Royalty Corporation (TSE:LIF), it owns 15.1% of the equity and therefore profits in the private Iron Ore Company of Canada as well as a 7% royalty on the sales of the ore. For steel specifically there is Stelco Holdings Inc (TSE: STLC) in Hamilton.
Cobalt
60% of the world’s Cobalt comes from the Democratic Republic of the Congo, and 17–40% of that comes from “Artisanal mining”, which evokes images of some Portland artisanal bakery serving cartel sourced avocado toast, but in reality it is a nice way of saying children in mudpits. The term artisanal can only be accurately used when referring to “boutique” goods, and not commodities like Cobalt, because its not like these kids are presenting the hipsters with iPhone batteries wrapped in a tight bow. In fact the issue with Cobalt is precisely because it is a commodity and you can mix it in with Cobalt from differing sources and not be able to tell it apart which makes it difficult to track where it is coming from if someone wants to keep that information hidden.
It ought to really be called “Informal Handmining” as it connects it to the broader “informal economy” that characterizes much of Africa, for instance people live in informal settlements, which in Brazil might be called favelas, or in India called slums, but the term “informal settlement” is a technical term and thus applicable everywhere and illustrates that these people in the informal economy largely exist outside the formal financial system. This makes it difficult to just outright ban “artisanal mining” because it is a crucial economic activity for farmers during the dry season or other off times when they otherwise couldn’t work and it is available to them precisely because of its informal nature because they don’t need to be plugged into the financial system to do it. Anyone can pick up a shovel and start digging without needing much start-up capital. This is also why it is so useful to rebel groups because anyone can pick up a gun and start telling some kids from the village you captured to pick up a shovel and start digging minerals.
See what happened was that after the Rwandan genocide when the current president of Rwanda, Kagame and his Tutsi rebels, who were based in Uganda, ousted the former Hutu government. That previous government became the new rebels and fled to Zaire. Rwanda’s new government started intervening in Zaire to chase them down, one thing lead to another and all sorts of African countries got involved for their own reasons and it all eventually lead to the ousting of the Zaire’s long time dictator Mobutu and the country became the Democratic Republic of the Congo under president Kabila. The thing is that Kabila didn’t want to listen to all these African countries that were occupying the Congo so to avert a coup against him he expelled all their forces with the help of a different set of African countries a year later which is called the Second Congo War, but to be honest the whole thing should just be called the Great Congo War because it seems like a singular event.
See the thing is that this conflict didn’t exactly end. Instead all the other African countries just lost interest, but all the rebel groups kept fighting, and some say they are still fighting to this day (because they are). One reason is that these rebel groups also operate in the informal economy, so while your average third world dictator can pop over to the IMF to get some of that sweet foreign investment loan money to build a snazzy new mine, your average rebel leader doesn’t have those Official International Recognition Privileges and so has got to scrape by with what they can find, and in a country whose average age is 17, usually what they find is children. The exact same supply chains that the “artisanal miners” use to sell their minerals to mining companies can also be used by the rebel groups as a means of funding so they can be self-sustaining indefinitely.
Canada has a town named after Cobalt in Ontario which has been trying to attract mining investment interest. Agnico Eagle Mines (TSE:AEM) is a gold miner but they were the last company to be operating silver mines near the town and so still have 21% of the sites but have just been sitting on them since the 1980s as back then cobalt was considered a waste product. First Cobalt Corp (TSX-V:FCC) owns 45% of the sites.
Nickel, Copper, Zinc
For current cobalt production though you got to go with Sheritt International (TSE:S) as they produce it as byproduct of nickel production in Cuba. They ship the minerals off to Fort Sasketchewan, Alberta and process them with chemicals from a fertilizer company they also own. They also produce Oil and Gas and generate electricity so they are a highly vertically integrated operation.
Lundin Mining (TSE:LUN) produces Nickel, Copper, and Zinc. They also have gold, silver, and lead in some areas, but they mostly do Copper out of the Atacama desert in Chile, but also operate mines in Sweden, Portugal, Michigan, and Brazil. First Quantum Minerals (TSE:FM) also does Copper/Zinc with some gold byproducts in Zambia, Mauritania, Turkey, Spain, Finland, and Panama.
Zinc, Gallium
Gallium can melt in your hand as its melting point is below the human body temperature at 29.76 degrees Celsius. That also means it can freeze at room temperature, so you can switch it states just by holding in your hands or letting it go. Gallium can only be mined alongside Aluminum (Bauxite) or Zinc as it is does not form concentrated deposits. So you might want to go with Zinc miners such as Titan Mining (TSE:TN).
Zinc, Germanium, Molybdenum, Cadmium, Indium, Lead
Germanium is directly below Silicon and so it is also good for making semi-conductors, in fact the early semi-conductor electronics were entirely dependent on germanium until they switched to silicon. It is mostly a by-product of Zinc mining, but it can also be recovered from coal power plants that burn coal containing Germanium, so I have to assume as coal power winds down that alternative sources will need to be found. Russia and China source their Germanium from Lignite, also known as brown coal, which has the lowest heat content, and its also probably why its called Germanium because Germany is the largest producer of lignite in the world. Studies have shown that the best source of Germanium would be in Mississippi Valley Type Carbonate-hosted Lead-Zinc deposits. Teck Resources (TSE:TECK) mines steelmaking coal, zinc, copper, and secondarily produces molybdenum from its BC copper mines (they also own large copper/zinc mines in Chile/Peru), and from their Zinc mines they produce lead, silver, germanium, indium, cadmium.
Indium-Tin Oxide is used in touchscreens and solar panels as it is transparent but also conducts electricity.
Cadmium Sulfide is a material I worked with in a lab where I had to press yellow paste into a screen to test its conducting properties. To this day I have no idea why I was doing this or if I discovered anything useful, all I know is that it produced a weird graph on the machine I was using and that my supervisor agreed was shaped weird, so maybe I screwed something up or maybe the report I made contains the beginnings of next great discovery in electronics when you need a material that behaves exactly like my weird graph. The yellow paste can give you cancer though so that is fun. I wore mask and gloves while using it so I was well prepared for the events of 2020. Cadmium Telluride is used in solar panels, and Tellurium is below Sulphur on the periodic table. I remember that everything needed to be absolutely dark when I was doing pressing and testing so I’m pretty sure my testing had something to do with photovoltaics.
Arsenic
You know how in sim city 4 you would raise taxes on dirty industry up to 20.0% so they wouldn’t show up? China seems like that one city where you didn’t do that, as they produce 25,000 tons of Aresenic yearly for a total of 70% of the world share.
Also for some reason we feed Arsenic to chickens, and Pfizer (NYSE:PFE) suspended sales of this innovative chicken feed when it was “discovered” in 2011 that this was a bad idea as it was causing there to be high levels of inorganic arsenic in chickens because the “organic” arsenic was undergoing chemical process that transformed it in the chicken! I’m shocked, nobody could have predicted this. I guess I shouldn’t worry so much about the cadmium.
Pfizer spun off its Chicken Arsenic company Alphamara into Zoetis (NYSE:ZTS) which is an animal pharmaceutical producer which provided arsenic feed to turkeys. I’m sure the chemical properties of turkeys are substantially different than that of chickens, nothing to worry about here (to be fair it was a completely different sort of organic arsenic as there were 4 approved before the chicken arsenic was banned, leaving 3 which eventually all bit the dust). I think the FDA withdrew approval for all arsenic feeds in 2015 though so the saga of Arsenic Turkeys came to a close prematurely.
When not being used to feed chickens, Arsenic is useful to “dope” semiconductors as an intentional impurity to slightly alter its properties. Arsenic is usually a waste product, like for instance with Copper-Arsenic processing at Teck Resources from the germanium section.
Selenium
Selenium is a semiconductor and a byproduct in many sulfide ores (as it is just below sulfur and above cadmium) such as when with nickel, copper, and lead. You can also get it as a byproduct of sulfuric acid production. Copper indium gallium selenide (yes all of them) solar cells are thin and flexible but there are not many cases where you would need a flexible solar panel so production hasn’t taken off. Mitsubishi (TYO: 8058) seems to be a major producer so you can invest in Canadian Iron Ore and Selenium at the same time if you want.
Bromine
Bromine is primarily produced in the United States and Israel thanks to salts from the dead sea and other salt lakes through the use of chlorine gas to do halogen exchange with the ions as chlorine is more reactive than bromine so it basically just swaps them. The two American companies that do this are Albermale Corporation (NYSE:ALB) for 28% of its revenue, which is also the largest provider of lithium for electric car batteries at 37.8% of its revenue, and Chemutura (NYSE:CHMT) which produces brominated fire retardants among other things.
Krypton, Xenon
These noble gasses are mostly used in medical technologies and lasers, as wells as for SpaceX’s Starlink electric propulsion system called a Hall-effect thruster, which if you played Kerbal Space Program you will know is a slow but long lasting propulsion system that relies on shooting out ions at high speeds. They are thus useful for satellites which don’t need to change position quickly but do need to stay in operation for long periods of time. They are produced the same way as Neon by fractional distillation.
Rubidium, Cesium
It is radioactive, and it has a half-life of 49 billion years so you better use it before its gone. It is produced by fractional crystallization (dissolving and trying to separate stuff by crystallizing under different conditions) of a rubidium and cesium alum (an alum is a hydrated aluminum based salt that might also have some other stuff in it). Cesium can also melt in human hands but you probably shouldn’t try it because it would probably blow your hands off since its the most reactive element that exists.
Cesium is used in atomic clocks to define time itself and therefore also space as lengths are defined by the speed of light going for a specific amount of time. Power Metals Corp (TSX-V:PWM) is a Cesium miner that will be mining pollucite (which can also produce rubidium) in lithium-rich pegmatites (which is another type of rock mineral if all these different -ites are becoming a pain). 82% of the world’s pollucite reserves are located in the Tanco mine in Bernic Lake, Manitoba, but this mine is owned by China (Sinomine) because the Cabot Corporation (NYSE:CBT) which used to produce Cesium and own the mine sold that division to them in 2019. Power Metals will be producing at an Ontario mine called Case Lake and will also be producing Tantalum and Lithium. Sinomine in September 2020 signed of letter of intent to finance Power Metals for some reason. Why is all this happening? We got some minerals and china is trying to Cesium.
Strontium, Barium
Strontium was used to make cathode ray tube colour televisions but we have since moved on to different technologies. It is used in glow in the dark toys, fireworks, and radioactive isotopes are used for medical purposes now because it is similar to calcium for bones. Barium has similar properties and can be used as rat poison. Barium however can also be used as part of Yttrium Barium Copper Oxide superconductors.
Baryte the mineral used in producing Barium also is used in the oil industry as part of drilling fluids because it is so dense that by dissolving it in a fluid it can stop pressure from blowing the fluid out. Baryte mining is done by Voyageur Pharmaceuticals (TSX-V:VM) which also has a mining division that is expanding into Lithium.
Yttrium
Yttrium is another rare-earth element, just below Scandium. The rest of the rare earth elements are the Lanthanides series culminating in Lutetium which is directly below Yttrium meaning the rare earths sort of make an L-shape that fell over if you include the Lanthanide and Actinide block in the table rather than putting it below separately like the tables usually do. Yttrium is used in lithium batteries and superconductors. Yttrium is 400 times as abundant in the earth’s crust as Silver, but as the rare earths usuall are, it never appears on its own the way silver does.
Yttrium is most abundant in a mineral called Xenotime, and the US geological survey has a handy database of all the places that have this mineral. Thor Lake in the North West Territories is one such place and the site is owned by Avalon Rare Metals (TSE:AVL) who also have a Tantalum/Cesium site in northern Ontario, a Tin site in Nova Scotia. and a Lithium site in northern Ontario. They don’t seem to do any actual mining yet as it says it became inactive when rare earth prices plunged, but recently they’ve been moving forward with neodymium and praseodymium mining as those elements are in demand, but if Yttrium was in demand they could start producing it.
Titanium, Zirconium
Zirconium is usually produced as a by-product of Titanium mining. Zircon minerals are contained in the sand titanium is extracted from (yes titanium is made from sand). Canada is third in the world for Heavy Mineral Sands Mining, behind Australia and South Africa. Medallion Resources (TSX-V:MDL) does heavy mineral sands mining for zirconium and titanium, but they also do rare earths as Monazite is found in the same Zircon, Rutile, and Ilmenite sands usually extracted for titanium production.
Niobium, Molybdenum, Technetium
We already know about Niocorp (TSE:NB) for Niobium, and Teck Resources (TSE:TECK) for Molybdenum. Both those metals are usually only used for alloys and have niche uses in superconductors or to be corrosion resistant in molten salt reactors.
Technetium is similar in that its usage is niche, but it is unique for elements with low atomic numbers because it needs to be synthetically produced by humans because all known isotopes are radioactive and the only naturally occurring isotopes are produced as part of the radioactive fission process of Uranium and Thorium ore, but it quickly decays into Ruthenium. Technetium-97 is produced from Molybdenum through neutron capture. Adding an additional neutron causes the molybdenum to become unstable and emit a beta particle, which is a high energy negative electron, which means to keep the balance the neutron becomes a positive proton, incrementing the atomic number up by one. This is all cool science, but because it is radioactive and has similar properties to Molybdenum there is little we actually use it for. Doubly so since the uses for molybdenum to begin with are niche.
However they are crucial niche uses such as in nuclear medicine. Other elements have had roles in nuclear medicine, but they usually haven’t been their primary economic use, and Technetium is especially useful for it since it is synthetic and decays over time, so detecting any of it at all gives you a pretty good indication that its presence is due to whatever medical procedure you were attempting in order to introduce it.
In 2018 there was a disruption is the US supply of Molybdenum-99 coming from Chalk River in Canada (so we used to make it but not anymore). Molydenum-99 is a radioactive isotope with a half-life of 66 hours, which is used to produce Technetium-99 which has a half-life of 6 hours. Because half of the mass of the isotope decays into something else every time a half-life passes they need to be produced constantly and disruptions in the supply chain mean near-instantaneous shortages, so the US federal government selected 4 companies to produce Molybdenum-99 without using highly enriched uranium (which can be used to make nuclear bombs so processes that avoid using it can lower the risk of nuclear weapons proliferation). All these companies are private held though.
When it was being produced in Chalk River, it was owned by Atomic Energy of Canada limited, which is a Crown Corporation, but it was operated under contract by a private corporation owned by SNC-Lavalin (TSE:SNC) who are famous from having bribed Gaddafi’s son with $30,000 in escorts on a $1.9 million trip to Montreal in 2008.
There is however a Canadian Vancouver based company that has developed a process for producing Technetium-99 called ARTMS inc but it also seems to be privately held. ARTMS cyclotron technology though seem promising since it apparently can be retrofitted onto existing medical cyclotrons allowing for local production
Ruthenium, Rhodium, Osmium, Iridium
Ruthenium is the first of the Platinum-group metals, which also includes Rhodium, Palladium, as well as the 3 metals directly below them on the table, Osmium, Iridium, and Platinum. Noble metals include those 6 as well as Copper, Silver, and Gold (all in the same column), in addition to Rhenium and Mercury jutting outwards on the table on the lowest row available to the pre-Uranium naturally occurring metals. Those artificial Trans-uranic elements below them might have similar properties but we don’t know enough about them yet. Noble metals are called that because they have low chemical reactivity just like noble gases. Noble metals are generally what we think of when we think of metal as they are the elements that will last the longest amount of time in their metallic form. Although some metals are more noble than others, such that the Platinum-group which are mostly used as catalysts to other reactions precisely because of them being so good at staying in their metallic form rather than reacting.
Ruthenium is made from pentlandite which is found in Sudbury as it is a byproduct of Nickel mining. The other less famous platinum-group metals like Rhodium, Osmium, and Iridium are always found in the same places and are separated through various chemical processes. Sudbury Platinum Corp (TSX-V:SPC) is sometimes listed on its own, but it is part of Transition Metals (TSX-V:XTM) which has other Platinum Group Metal (PGM) mines elsewhere.
Palladium
Palladium specifically is more abundant that the others and is used in catalytic converters for internal combustion engine vehicles. It converts the nastier emissions into less toxic pollutants using palladium as a catalyst (get it? catalytic converters?) by serving as a platform which reduces the energy required to activate the reaction meaning it can occur at a quicker rate. Since by its very nature as a catalyst it is not used up in this process it can also be obtained by recycling older catalytic converters. For a Palladium specific company there is North American Palladium which operates mines near Thunder Bay, but they were bought out by a South African company called Impala (JSE:IMP), so Ivanhoe Mines (TSE:IVN) is a better option which ironically operates out of Southern Africa despite being a Canadian company and will be starting out with Palladium mining by 2022.
Silver
We finally come to the first big one. Many precious mining companies like Wheaton Precious Metals (TSE:WPM) will do both Silver and Gold, and even Palladium, although they purchase the metals from mines they don’t operate meaning they are a precious metals streaming company rather than a mining company. Usually a mining company that produces a precious metal in much lower quantities than a “base” metal they specialize in will make deals with a streaming company to have the precious by-products bought off them so they can focus on their specialization.
Pan American Silver Corp (TSE:PAAS) does actually operate silver mines in Mexico, Peru, Bolivia, Argentina, etc. There are also countless other silver mining stocks since its so lucrative.
Cadmium
Agggghh stop reminding me how I will die due to yellow cancer paste. Teck Resources (TSE:TECK)
Indium
Critical for your dumb phones to make a transparent conductor called Indium Tin Oxide. Teck Resources (TSE:TECK)
Tin
Historically when bronze was all the rage before the collapse of civilization securing a source of the one-eighth portion of tin needed to mix with seven-eighths copper was absolutely vital to the foundation of your Bronze Age state.
We don’t even actually know where these ancient empires even to the ancients got their Tin but it was most likely in Cornwall on the south-west tip of Great Britain. Complex supply chains where nobody in them quite understands the whole thing is nothing new and they won’t be going away anytime soon, and it is likely that the exchange of this Tin occurred largely spontaneously as traders operating on the margins on this civilization traded with other traders who got it from other traders who collected it from ancient “artisanal miners” scattered where ever it could be found.
Following the Bronze Age collapse these artisanal miners probably quickly realized that the flow of goods they were trading the Tin for had stopped without explanation and so they moved on to do something else, with neither end knowing what had happened to the other, and any “institutional knowledge” that existed where the networks of contacts knew who they needed to talk to to get what they needed was lost and so nobody could reestablish it that easily (not for lack of trying on the part of the Phoenicians who sailed in search of the legendary Tin Islands, which interestingly means that long ago Britain was once the far flung place people searched for in order to extract its resources).
When civilization re-emerged in the Iron Age the new metal of choice had a much simpler supply chain although it was a far more technically advanced metallurgically due to the higher temperatures required to smelt iron versus bronze. Interestingly before these advances in metallurgy were made there were still some things made from iron, its just they needed to be made from already metallic iron found in meteorites, as we have examples of meteoric iron daggers from ancient Egypt. It was figuring out how to make iron from ore that reintroduced large enough quantities of a metal to support civilizations again.
Originally bronze was made from Arsenic and Copper, but the ancients soon figured out that arsenic was toxic and found an alternative in tin.(Hopefully it only took them about as long as it took us to realize feeding it to chickens was a bad idea. Alternative suggestions beyond realize Arsenic was toxic involve Arsenical Bronze requiring hardening after production unlike tin bronze so it might be a coincidence that they stopped using it despite its ill health effects)
Nowadays we use tin-plated steel to store food, which is why they are called tin cans. Also if you flip the ratio of bronze and use mostly tin with some copper (along with antimony) you get pewter. Tin is also alloyed with lead to be used as solder which is the majority of Tin consumption. Already mentioned is the Indium Tin Oxide for touch screens.
Tin is obtained from Stannic Oxide, otherwise known as Cassiterite minerals. Alongside Cobalt, Cassiterite is one of the minerals that are fought over in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. Therefore it could be said that “artisanal miners” are still fighting over it even after 3 millennia. The issue with this is not that Cassiterite is rare, rather it is precisely because it is so common that makes it only economical to mine with the cheapest labour as it is tough to compete with “free”. Besides the DRC the biggest producers are China and Indonesia, which has some mudpits of its own but these people tend not to mine it at gunpoint. Instead locals will dredge up river beds because the mineral tends to get washed downstream and deposited relatively quicker due to its high specific gravity (density) relative to water, so what they do is they blast the sand river banks with water and pick up the cassiterite that remains. China in contrast mostly does hard rock mining which is what you would be more familiar with when you think of the term mining.
Intercontinental Gold (TSX-V:ICAU) is a gold refining company that also handles base metals like Tin, Antimony, and Tungsten, and operates out of Canada, Bolivia, and Peru, which is the third largest supplier behind China and Indonesia. They don’t do the mining themselves but they get it from suppliers.
Antimony
Antimony is a metalloid, which means its properties are in-between that of a metal and that of a non-metal. The metalloids form a sort of staircase in the middle of the right end of the periodic table and also includes stuff like Boron, Silicon, Germanium, Arsenic, and Tellurium. Aluminum could technically be part of this staircase but it seems to have more metallic qualities which tends to keep it out of the club. Polonium and Astatine would seem to be in the right spot, but they are part of the post-lead elements that tend to be radioactive so those properties overshadow the whole metal vs non-metal thing that characterize the lighter elements.
The majority of Antimony production goes towards flame retardants, and the 6th largest producer is the Beaver Brook Antimony Mine in Newfoundland, but it has had a rocky road when due to Chinese investment it reopened in 2019 only to close again due to the pandemic in 2020. It seems to be affiliated with a privately run mining consultancy company called Watts, Griffis, and McOuat (WGM). Overall this seems to be another one of those elements that China quietly monopolizes. I have been able to find an Australian (4th largest producer in the world) company called Red River resources (ASX:RVR) which produces it alongside gold. There is also Intercontinental Gold (TSX-V:ICAU) again which also gets antimony alongside its gold and tin from Bolivia, which is the third largest producer of antimony in the world.
Tellurium
Beyond cadmium telluride for solar panels, tellurium is also used in alloys for steel and copper which is added to make the metal more machinable. It is produced from anode sludges, which means that its the stuff that is leftover when you try to refine copper electrolytically, which means copper smelters would be the largest producers of tellurium. Barrick Gold (TSE:ABX) is also one of the world’s largest copper producers.
Iodine
Iodine is a halogen but it is solid at room temperature, contrasted with the lighter bromine above it which is a liquid at room temperatures. These are further contrasted with Chlorine Gas which is a chemical weapon at room temperatures. The harmful nature of halogens in their elemental forms is because of their high reactivity, which is also what makes them absolutely crucial to life as ions in compounds or dissolved in water, such as table salt. Iodine is also critical as deficiencies disrupt the operation of the thyroid which regulates the metabolism. To prevent iodine deficiencies iodine is often added to table salt.
Iodine, like most salt component elements is usually produced from brine mines, specifically it is usually found from deep brines pushed to the surface by oil and gas production, specifically by Japan in the Kanto Gas Fields off the shore of Tokyo. The Ise Chemicals Company (TYO:4107) is the main producer of iodine in Japan, as well as in Oklahoma as part of their subsidiary Woodward Iodine corp. Ise is itself majority owned by glass manufacturer AGC inc (TYO:5201) and almost 1/8 owned by Mitsubishi (TYO:8058) while AGC itself is part of the Mitsubishi group of companies, which goes to show how much of a behemoth Mitsubishi truly is.
Lanthanum, Cerium, Praseodymium, Neodymium
Since we have already discussed Xenon, Cesium, and Barium due to them being more interesting than their respective lighter siblings, we come to the conclusion of our extensive foreshadowing by beginning the Lanthanide series, which are the remaining rare earth elements besides Scandium and Yttrium. Now the International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry actually recommends this series be called the Lanthanoids, since -ide would suggest they were ions, but who listens to the IUPAC’s little red book in the current year anymore? They are just a bunch of Nomenclature Fascists. What is this, 1985?
Despite being eponymous to the series, Lanthanum is usually beaten out by Cerium and Neodymium in abundance, that last one you might recognize as being the metal used in high powered magnets. Lanthunum and the Lathanides in general all have a series of niche uses, but one common usage is in nickel-metal hydride batteries, but even there they tend to be used in something called mischmetal which is an alloy of various rare earth metals. While pure Lathanum (or other Lanthanides) could be used, in this case an alloy of various rare earths is used since they have similar enough properties that it just isn’t economically to attempt to separate them for purposes where mischmetal will suffice. As such, by weight, mischmetal tends to be primarily cerium, with lanthanum and neodymium following close behind with other rare earths bringing up the rear. Other uses for mischmetal include lighter flints, as it is pyrophoric which is a fancy way of saying it catches on fire if exposed to air.
Praseodymium is noteworthy by itself for giving a yellow tint when added to glass or other materials. It also is difficult to extract from neodymium so they often together form something called didymium which is used to make goggles for glassblowing. These same properties that make them good for goggles also make neodymium good for lasers, when combined with glass it also has the cool property of appearing blue under fluorescent light, while appearing purple under incandescent light (which is the same type as daylight since it is light emitted from a hot body, where as fluorescent light is sort of like “recycled” light as it is emitted by a substance which has previously absorbed electromagnetic radiation, which is what light is.)
Its magnetic properties however are what is most important to us since they can make powerful permanent magnets that are also lightweight, which makes them useful for large things like wind turbines (since the mechanism for creating electricity involves passing a magnet near a coil of wire repeatedly, and the more powerful the magnet the better) but also for tiny things which still require a powerful magnet like computer hard disks, and microphones, speakers, and headphones, which doesn’t bode well considering how often I go through those little buggers.
Electric motors work in exactly the reverse manner as an electric generator in that it involves using an electric current to generate a magnetic field to push a magnet repeatedly, so rare earth magnets are also useful for things that require electric motors like electric cars, which means that along with microphones/speakers there seems to be a pattern where the magnets are useful both on the way into electric current/digital information and on the way out.
These “bulk” light rare earth elements (LREE) are of course mined by China (as well as the subsequent Heavy Rare Earth elements which are produced alongside them but they generally come in smaller quantities), but there are companies such as Canada Rare Earth Corp (TSX-V:LL) that are looking to start production “soon”. Looking is a key word here. For something a bit closer to actually existing you can go with Neo Performance Materials (TSX:NEO). They might not necessarily do mining, but they produce “advanced” materials such as Lanthanides. Considering how finnicky mining can be, involvement in the processing is probably a better idea than extraction anyway.
Promethium
Promethium is distinguished due to its radioactivity, which is unique among the pre-lead elements. It is a trait shared only by Technetium, which interestingly is also the fifth element it its respective block (and thereby the seventh element in its row). This is probably why Technetium is named after techne for “craft” (or you could just say technique), while Promethium is named after the greek god credited with bringing fire technology to humans by stealing it from Mount Olympus, as both need to be created through technology by man, although some promethium does naturally exist through decay of other radioactive elements such as uranium or europium.
Promethium is produced synthetically by bombarding Uranium-235 with neutrons(the enriched kind that is the 1%, not any of that plebeian Uranium-238 that make up the 99%). It mostly used for luminous paint that takes advantage of absorbing the beta decay electrons it emits through radioactivity to emit light. Due to Promethium-147's relatively long half life period of 2.6 years, it also can make atomic batteries which are useful for providing a low amount of electricity over a long period of time such as 5 years. After the two half lives are over only 25% of the original mass of the Promethium-147 will be left, the rest will have decayed into Samarium-147.
Currently Russia is the only country producing Promethium in considerable quantities, but Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee has a new process which can produce it economically.
Samarium
Samarium in combination with Cobalt is useful for higher temperature rare earth magnets. The reason for this is that its curie point is high enough that it won’t lose any magnetic properties up to 700 degrees Celsius (as opposed to 300 degrees Celsius for neodymium magnets). Permanent magnets work as a result of all the magnetic dipoles in the atoms of the metal being aligned rather than in random directions which cancel each other out like they are usually. At high temperatures this alignment risks being undone as the dipoles can begin aligning themselves randomly once they are energetic enough to begin changing. Similarly a permanent magnet can be created by heating up a metal and then using a magnet to align the dipoles in a specific way and then cooling it before the magnet is removed, at which point the dipoles are unable to become randomly distributed due to being at too low a temperature.
Europium
Europium is the most reactive rare earth element, which means it rarely exists in metallic form outside a compound, once of such is Europium Oxide, which is used to emit the red phosphor on screens, which was one of the earliest uses of rare earth elements which lead to the original scramble for rare earths in the Mountain Pass rare earth mine in California when the colour tv was invented.
Gadolinium
Gadolinium is mainly used for medical imaging because of its interesting magnetic properties. Below the Curie point (the temperature in which magnetization is lost) of 20 degrees Celsius, it is ferromagnetic, which is what is conventionally understood as normal magnetism like that of Iron (hence ferro-magnetism). However above a room temperature of 20 degrees Celsius it is highly paramagnetic, which is to say a weaker form of magnetism wherein it does not retain magnetization after removing the external magnet. The usefulness of this dichotomy in properties around room temperature is obvious as the Gadolinium can be cooled in something as simple as a refrigerator to take advantage of its ferromagnetic properties, but shortly after placing it in a patient, body heat will bring the material above its curie point thus losing its ferromagnetic properties but you can still identify it due to its paramagnetism.
Terbium
We are starting to get into elements that if you said existed I would tell you that you just made up a random name ending in -ium. What’s next, drop the T for Erbium? Just checked and its not next … because we still have to get through Dysprosium and Holmium first. See there was this Swedish guy called Carl Gustaf Mosander who was exited to be the new father of an element and wanted to name them after the town of Ytterby where Yttrium was originally found, but since they were lanthanides they were all found together (lanthanum was literally named by him because of how “hidden” it was, as it had to separate it from cerium), so after separating yttrium he discovered that now he had to name twins. Oops triplets. Ah just keep dropping letters from the town’s name, I’m sure no one will notice.
Terbium is used in green phosphors so all that is left is blue. Blue phosphors use Zinc, Sulphur, Aluminum, and Chlorine.
Dysprosium
Dysprosium is a component in the material Terfenol-D which has the highest room temperature Magnetostriction. What is this diction? Magnetostriction is when a material can change shape in the process of magnetization.
This phenomena explains why transformers which convert high voltage current from power lines to current useful in buildings has a constant low hum called coil whine. In order to change the voltage alternating current will constantly magnetize and demagnetize coils. A changing magnetic field can then produce a current in an entirely separate set of coils with a different voltage, with the ratios between the number of coils determining the change in the voltage. The hum comes from the slight but constant change in the shape of the metal being constantly magnetized and demagnetized.
Dysprosium in an alloy with Terbium and Iron changes a lot more than the metal in a transformer when it is magnetized. As a pure element, Cobalt has the highest magnetostriction.
Holmium
Holmium gets its name from Stockholm, which makes that another element named after a Swedish place. While most countries are lucky to get one element named after them, Sweden didn’t bother and just went straight to naming them after towns and cities. This is obviously because Sweden did most of the work in identifying the numerous rare earth elements due to the mine found in the aforementioned town of Ytterby.
Holmium has the highest magnetic strength of any element, which makes it useful as an accompaniment to high powered magnets as the “pole piece” which sort of functions like a lightning rod for magnetism as it concentrates the magnetic flux (which is the density/strength of a magnetic field at a particular location).
We are getting dangerously close to terms like flux capacitor now, so briefly a capacitor is when you have large amounts of opposite (+/-) electrical charge along two conductive plates separated by an insulating material. This situation creates a consistent electric field between the large electrical potential difference of negative and positive plates as well serving as an accumulation of that electric charge to be released later (even perhaps all at once). The term flux capacitor is of course nonsensical as a capacitor is for charge, not flux. A charge generates an electric field and the strength of that field across a surface is flux, and so a capacitor has a consistent flux across a surface parallel to the two plates. You cannot “store” flux, which is what a capacitor does, however you can “concentrate” it which is what a pole piece does.
The stainless steel body of the DeLorean is said to aid in the “flux dispersal” which actual does make some sense as the opposite of what a pole piece does, by dispersing the magnetic flux rather than concentrating it, but it isn’t clear if he is talking about magnetic or electrical flux or more likely both, since given that 1.21 gigawatts is a measure of electrical power (which is energy per unit time) but can also be used to measure something known as radiant flux, which is the energy of electromagnetic radiation (light) per unit time. However radiant flux is using the term “flux” in a manner completely different than magnetic flux which is sometimes called magnetic flux density to avoid this confusion. In this sense a flux capacitor is just a storage of power emitted by light, so it is literally just a normal electrical capacitor that needs to be charged. The plutonium based reactor (or lightning) in this sense acts a battery that produces 1.21 gigawatts of power that can charge up the capacitor which can then release the stored energy even quicker than the reactor or lightning could.
That is interesting but unrelated to Holmium so I don’t know why I continued on this tangent, but I blame the writers of the movie for using needlessly complicated technobabble, without which people would have been a lot quicker to point out that there would be no particular reason a normal capacitor would need to be charged up using 1.21 gigawatts rather than just charging with a lower level of power over a longer period of time.
Erbium
Did you know Atilla the Hun had a son named Erp. Erp the Hun. Now of course the source we have for this is just a prose section by some medieval Icelandic poet, and to provide an example as to why medieval poetry is not a good source, medieval poetry making connections with the Huns is the entire reason the Magyars are called Hungarians despite not really being related according to scholarship. However the fact that somebody, some time, thought there was a guy called Erp the Hun is enough for me, and that one person could include just myself, as Erp the Hun is still a hilarious name even if I am completely making it up, so I totally support some Icelandic poet’s historical fanfiction about Attila’s son named Erp.
Erbium is the Erp the Hun of elements. Even disregarding the hilarious way it got the name due to just dropping letters from the element that came before it, Erbium is still my candidate for the funniest element name. There is also the fact that the twin elements were mixed up at birth so what Mosander called Terbia is actually Erbia and vice-versa. It just keeps getting better the more I look into it. Even the symbol Er, just makes me think somebody isn’t too sure if this isn’t all just some elaborate prank the Scandinavians are pulling on us like maybe with Erp the Hun.
Erbium is primarily used to make dental lasers as an erbium doped lasers emit light in the infrared spectrum. It also can be used to colour glass pink.
Thulium
Thulium is the rarest stable rare earth, as promethium is radioactive and therefore only briefly exists in small amounts. Thulium isotopes produce via neutron bombardment are used as the radiation source for portable x-ray machines as they can last for about a year.
Thulium and Holmium were apparently separated from Erbia, so the saga continues as the rare earth mother just kept popping out new babies left and right on the table.
Ytterbium
Yttrium, Terbium, Erbium, and Ytterbium are all named after the village of Ytterby. I’ve always found it odd that they waited that long to name an element after the whole village name rather than just a part of the name, but seeing as how they just kept separating more and more elements from the other ones it was bound to happen eventually because it was not like they could call it rbium.
One of the things it is used for is as a Qubit for Quantum Computers, so it might become important when Quantum Computers become important.
Lutetium
Finally! We’ve made it to the ends of the earths! Lutetium is directly below Scandium and Yttrium and so forms the corner of the L on the long periodic table. Lutetium Tantalate, a compound of Lutetium and Tanatalum bonded with Oxygen, is the densest stable white material known to man, which makes it a good host for phosphors. Small amounts of the phospor material that gives the colour is added to a Lutetium and Tantalate mixture before they are bonded into a salt.
Hafnium
Hafnium has a high ability to capture neutrons which makes it good for the control rods in nuclear power plants. Overall though it has similar properties to Zirconium which is the element right above it so it isn’t used for much since it is rarer and therefore more expensive. It is found it the same titantium sands as zirconium, and so Medallion Resources (TSX-V:MDL) was the company I selected for mineral sands mining, though its possible they don’t actually do it and instead just purchase the rare earth mineral byproducts. It isn’t completely clear. If you want mineral sands mining you can always go with our old friend Rio Tinto (ASX:RIO).
Tantalum
Several companies I have listed have already been involved in tantalum production, including Power Metals (TSX-V:PWM) and Avalon Rare Metals (TSE:AVL). Its main use is in tantalum capacitors, which are a component in many electronic devices. It is also a conflict mineral as Coltan is one of the many minerals mined in the Democratic Republic of the Congo. The US geological survey estimated in 2020 that 40% production came from the DRC, with Brazil, Rwanda, and Congo together making up 77%. It also states that reserves in Australia, Brazil, and Canada were adequate for current needs. This means that it is technically possible to avoid using Congolese minerals entirely, but because it is difficult to compete with “free”, mining is “outsourced” to the places that will do it the cheapest. It also says that if you accept performance losses or higher prices, Aluminum, Ceramics, and Niobium can substitute Tantalum in electronic capacitors. What this means is we absolutely could avoid using conflict minerals but we don’t.
The Tantalum Mining Corporation of Canada (TANCO) which has a mine in Manitoba on Bernic lake that is also the world’s largest reserve of Cesium was sold to China’s Sinomine in 2019. It is times like this where I question our sanity.
Tungsten
Wolfram is such a cool name. Tungsten is pretty cool too. Tungsten has the highest melting point of any element, 3422 degrees Celsius. Boiling point is 5930 degrees Celsius, which is hotter than the surface of the sun. Now despite that comparison being made often I do not believe that this means you would just have liquid tungsten floating around on the surface of the sun. The surface pressure of the sun appears to be quite minimal so I would have to assume the boiling point at those low pressures would be at a lower temperature as there wouldn’t be as much atmospheric pressure “pressing” on the tungsten to keep it a liquid.
Not to mention the density of tungsten is comparable to Gold and Uranium and is 1.7 times that of Lead, so it would most certainly sink into the core where the temperatures are much higher and even gases turn into the fourth state of matter, plasma, where electrons and protons no longer even want to stay together as that is how much everything wants to get apart from each other in their hyperactivity, which is what temperature is ultimately measuring. For elements larger than hydrogen, the plasma state largely consists of just the weakest held outer electrons becoming free rather than an electron-proton soup, but the sun is mostly hydrogen so that is a good description of its interior. On earth sufficiently hot flames can result in gasses ionizing into plasma, which is interesting because it means that the “four elements” of earth, water, air, and fire would actually describe the four fundamental phases of that matter can be in more so than the actual elements that make up matter. Though the pressure of the interior of the sun is a lot higher so maybe it will turn back into a solid as it falls down. Overall though since I am even debating with myself if it could survive being in the sun the point is that Tungsten is tough.
Most Tungsten is located in China, but Canada is number 2 for reserves, but Canada’s sole Tungsten mine was closed in 2015. Much like other elements the reason for this is that the countries that can produce it cheapest generally keep the price below the line where it would be economically to produce it in Canada. Despite the issue with low prices, Almonty Industries (TSE:AII) is a tungsten mining company operating in South Korea, Portugal, and Spain. That last one is interesting as during world war 2 the allies placed pressure on Spain to stop selling Tungsten to Germany in the Wolfram Crisis. Tungsten was useful for weapons for the same reason we might use depleted uranium today, since their densities are similar.
Rhenium
Rhenium is added to high-temperature superalloys used to make jet engine parts, which is probably one of the coolest sentences out there. This uses up 70% of world production, mostly from Chile, United States, Peru, and Poland. A superalloy is just an alloy that can perform well at temperatures close to its melting point. Un-super alloys may suffer from corrosion or oxidation at these temperature, or experience something called thermal creep deformation, which I’m thinking that you might be most familiar with if you have left out a plastic material on a hot day and saw it begin to sag, though I have not seen anyone else explain this phenomena using the concept of thermal creep deformation so it could be something else entirely.
Rhenium is mined by Freeport McMoran (NYSE:FCX) as it is contained in the same ores as Molybdenum which is something that they have multiple sites mining.
Platinum
Osmium and Iridium were already discussed, so we will go directly to Platinum which gives its name to the Platinum group metals which are the most inert metals located right in the middle of the periodic table.
Platinum Group Metals (TSE:PTM) seems like the most obvious choice here for a company, but they also do Palladium, Gold, Copper, Nickel, and Rhodium. Platinum group metals are generally produced as a byproduct in the copper refining process. In 2014, 45% of the Platinum was used for vehicle emissions control (catalytic converters reliant on the inertness of platinum making it a good catalyst), 34% was used for jewelry (which again relies on its inertness to mean it lasts a long time), 9% was used for chemical production, and 3% for electrical applications.
Gold
Gold is highly conductive, dense, non-reactive, malleable and ductile material. Malleability is a material’s ability to preform and deform under compression, while ductility is the word used for ability to deform and perform under tension. A ductile material is thus highly adept at being pulled into long wires, which when combined with gold’s other properties, makes it perfect for electronic applications. Copper which is above Silver and Gold in the same column is used more often because it is cheaper, but it is more reactive meaning exposed copper might begin to corrode. To counter this usually larger copper wires are used so that the interior remains performable under a layer of copper that was reacted with the environment. Since Copper is also less dense than Gold this means the overall weight would not be affected that much by needing larger amounts of the copper, however when space rather than weight is the key, Gold’s inert and ductile properties make it perfect for high performance electrical applications.
Despite this, only about 10% of Gold production is used in industry, 50% is used in jewelry, and the remaining 40% is held as investments, as the low reactivity of gold also means that if you have a kilo of gold you can be fairly certain you will still have a kilo of gold in century.
Since I’ve already listed Barrick Gold (NYSE:GOLD) for copper, this time I’m going to say Kinross Gold (TSE:K) because I also find that ticker kind of funny. Technically though, Kinross is only fifth, and Barrick is second, the largest gold mining company is Newmont (TSE:NGT).
Mercury
Mercury is a liquid at room temperature but it also can turn into a gas at room temperatures so you have to be careful of its toxic fumes.
Mercury occurs in deposits of Mercury Sulfide called Cinnabar, which can be turned into a pigment called Vermillion by grinding. The grey Pewter that has already been discussed is a mixture of mostly Tin, but also Antimony and Copper. Viridian is composed of hydrated Chromium Oxide and is blue-green, while Cerulean blue is composed of Cobalt Stannate, which means Tin bonded with Oxygen. Celadon green is produced when in the firing process for pottery Iron goes from Ferric to Ferrous, which is to say Fe2O3 → FeO, so it goes from bonding by losing 3 electrons each to bonding by only losing 2 electrons each. Lavender and Fuchsia are flowers. A pallet is a piece of wood you use to mix and hold paint.
You would probably be most familiar with Mercury’s use as a gas in fluorescent lighting tubes. However it is also used in recovering Silver and Gold as the flecks of the precious metal will readily combine with the mercury into a larger block separate from other impurities. Finding a mercury mining company is difficult because much of the mercury used by “artisanal” gold and silver miners is also produced from cinnabar “artisanally”, and in terms of countries the number 1 producer is of course China. Much of the historical mercury mines have ceased production for environmental reasons, though Spain still has some in operation, but they are run by the state owned company Mayasa.
Thallium
Thallium was a major component in rat poison, but it was apparently way too good at killing other mammals, such as us, so many countries banned it. It is quite amazing how quickly we went from gold to deadly in no elements flat, and it doesn’t get any better from here because next is Lead and everything after is radioactive. Thallium is outright used specifically as a murder weapon, favoured by the Stasi in East Germany, and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. There is an antidote however called Prussian Blue which is a ferrous ferrocyanide which makes it sound like it should just result in you being double dead, but it is perfectly safe provided you only ingest the recommended 500 mg capsule, although if you do experience cyanide poisoning you can use Vitamin B12 or Hydroxocobalamin as an antidote for that.
This element that makes doctors recommend you ingest cyanide also has some electronic applications as thallium sulfide’s conductivity changes with exposure to infrared light so it is useful as a photoresistor. It is recovered as a byproduct of the roasting of Iron Pyrite used in the production of sulfuric acid, and so Thallium is likely supplied by Chemtrade Logistics (TSE:CHE.UN).
Lead
Lead is dense and malleable but it is much less ductile and has a low tensile strength which means it will break easily if stretched. It is also soft, which is to say it is 1.5 on Mohs scale of hardness, which means it can be scratched by all materials that are 2 or above on scale. Mohs is an ordinal scale, which is to say it is not known how much “harder” a 3 is in comparison to a 2 in comparison to when you compare a 2 to a 1, but what we do know is that 1 is the lowest on the scale and 10 in the highest, and if there is a higher number it has the ability to scratch lower numbers.
Scratching a material is a method of increasing the surface area susceptible to chemical reaction so that means it is relatively easy to render lead open to chemical attack, which is why it is potentially dangerous material to make things out of if there is a chance you might ingest the products of these reactions. Luckily however lead is resistant to corrosion, so as long as you aren’t scratching it then it can be relatively safe which is why lead plumbing doesn’t immediately poison everyone, instead there would need to be a particular issue with the plumbing before that occurs.
Nowadays lead is often used in lead-acid batteries. For companies Lundin Mining (TSE:LUN) and Teck Resources (TSE:TECK) have already been mentioned previously.
Bismuth
Bismuth was once believed to be stable but it turns out it is weakly radioactive with a half life that is more than a billion times the estimated age of the universe, so saying Lead is the last stable element is the best kind of correct: technically.
Pepto-bismol is probably the usage you would be most familiar with merely due to the fact that it is an advertised product used to relieve discomfort related to the digestive track. The scientific name is Bismuth Subsalicylate. Considering what elements surround it, the low toxicity of Bismuth is quite remarkable. I suppose the extremely weak radioactivity being the main issue with it.
Bismuth is produced as a byproduct of lead production, while branded Pepto-Bismol is produced by Proctor and Gamble (NYSE:PG).
Polonium
And we are back to our regularly scheduled deadly elements. Polonium has the distinction of not only killing the person who discovered it, but also probably her daughter too. Some elements take getting discovered personally. Polonium: The Revenge
Polonium’s main uses are for its radioactive properties, deadly or otherwise. It is produced via proton bombardment of Bismuth, though it sometimes briefly exists as a product of other radioactive elements before decaying itself, most notably as a component of tobacco smoke. So you’d better believe I’m giving this honour to Big Tobacco: Altria (NYSE:MO)
Astatine
Astatine would be a halogen, but it is so dense that it begins to exhibit some properties of a metal. While it briefly exists naturally as part of decay chains of heavier elements (such as Neptunium) where the chain alternates from emitting beta (electron) and alpha (2 protons and 2 neutrons, technically a helium nucleus) particles until it finds a stable position (usually Lead, but in this case Thallium). It is produced by bombarding Bismuth with Alpha Particles, which results in +2 on its atomic number. “Astatine is miserable to make and hell to work with” according to a man who has been through this hell, so it isn’t used for much.
Radon
Radon is a heavy radioactive gas. This means that not only can it irradiate you, it can also be “poured” where it is collected at the bottom of a container and can suffocate you by displacing all the oxygen. On a brighter note if you tried to talk while this was happening you would have your deepest voice possible before dying. When frozen the condensed material will glow yellow from the radiation.
Francium
And with Francium we have finally reached the last row in the periodic table. At one point I remember that the row had not yet been officially filled as some of these elements were discovered while I was alive. As theoretical elements they were named after their number, so Ununbium, or Ununtrium etc but now all of them have been officially discovered and given names, which means any further discoveries would have to most likely look towards the element that would be below Francium, if it exists.
As we have yet to produce any elements with more outer shells than Francium this is probably a lot less likely to happen though. For the elements up to what was Ununoctium, prior to their creation you could be relatively secure in saying that producing it was just a matter of dedicating the time and resources to doing it, as some there wouldn’t have been a good theoretical reason as to why you couldn’t just complete the layer on the outermost electron shell (which is to say finish the period), or even just why you couldn’t make element number 117 for instance if you already had 118 and 116 for example.
In contrast, it not being possible for an element 119 to exist is something that could be the case. We have never had any elements in the 8th period so maybe it is impossible for there to be an 8th period. If there was an 8th period though, would it continue the trend that every 2 periods the number of elements required to complete the period increases? Such that in addition to the Lanthanide-Actinide block, there will also be a new block starting with element 121? Or is this observed pattern purely coincidental and not a fundamental construct of reality? What I can predict is that if any element beyond 118 is produced we would produce plenty more, but as it stands right now we may have discovered and named every element we ever will. Future generations will not live in a world where the periodic table was still incomplete and that in my brief time here I experienced the tail end of the blank parts of the map being filled in.
Of course many a person has confidentially announced that anything that ever could be discovered has been discovered, so I could be proven wrong in short order as the last element, 117 was first synthesized in 2010, confirmed by a second team in 2014, and named Tennessine in 2016, and it is also possible that these newly discovered elements have not completed the period, and actually the seventh period extends longer than predicted due to unfilled subshells being filled in rather than starting the 8th shell. It is possible that an element 119 could exist 2 spaces to the right of Tennessine as a result of electrons being able to be arbitrarily added in succession contrary to our theoretical models. I say this because despite knowing enough about these elements to name them, we have not studied them all that much beyond confirming their existence, so there is still plenty of work to be done regardless.
Francium was the last element to be discovered from nature rather than by synthesizing it. You might think that this would be because it is too reactive to isolate, but the actual reason is that it is so radioactive that it was difficult to get enough of it together long enough to observe. We assume it would chemically reactive strongly just like cesium, but due to its tendency to turn into something else quickly we haven’t gotten enough of it together to confirm its melting point. We’ve theorized that it might be somewhere from 8 to 27 degrees Celsius, which means it could be a liquid at room temperature, or at the very least it could melt in your hand like gallium, but more likely it would melt your hand with an explosion when it contacts water, but this reaction has never been observed and is still hypothetical.
Radium
With a name like that you know we are in for a treat. Unlike with Francium we can actually study this material for long enough to know its properties. This also means we can actually use it for stuff, such as when we decided to use it to make glowing paint. Like most lighter radioactive elements it is extracted from uranium ores as it exists fleetingly as it decays as part of a chain, and since parts of the ore will be at different parts of the chain this means that usually you can expect a certain percentage of the ore to be any given part of the chain at any given point in time even if the same part will be changing gradually down the chain.
Actinium
Actinium gives its name to the Actinide series, which is the like the radioactive sibling of the Lanthanides. Actinium is probably one of the lesser known in the series though because it is what is called a non-primordial radioactive element. A primordial element is one that is theorized to have continuously existed since the earth was formed. For the stable elements this is easy to determine since they tend not to go anywhere. For the radioactive elements this is a bit harder to determine. What the theorists do is they work backwards using the half-lives of various isotopes to determine how long before most of it that could have existed at any given time will have become something else. This means that even if Actinium for instance was present at the formation of the planet, half of that specific Actinium would have become Francium every 10 days, meaning that after 100 days there would be less than 0.1% of the original Actinium left. Since the earth is estimated to be 4.5 billion years, there has been over 160 billion 10 day half-lives.
So safe to say none of the original Actinium is left. So why can it be found in nature? Because it is constantly being generated from the alpha decay of Protactinium just as Francium is constantly being generated from the alpha decay of Actinium. The main difference is that half of the generated Actinium sticks around for 10 days instead of the 22 minutes for half of the Francium, as it then either turns into Astatine via alpha decay, or more commonly into Radium via beta decay, which makes it go up by one on the table rather than down by two. Protactinium is usually generated from Beta decay from Thorium, which is only weakly radioactive with a half life of 14 billion years, which is incidentally approximately the age of the universe, meaning it is safe to classify Thorium as a primordial radioactive element as only about half the Thorium that even was present at the beginning of the universe would have decayed. More likely though Thorium, and Uranium another primordial radioactive element, were generated in supernovas some time after the creation of the universe before coalescing alongside other star death junk into the earth, but the principle is the same.
That there is a gap in between Bismuth and Thorium for non-primordial radioactive elements that includes Astatine, Radon, Francium, Radium, and Actinium meant that there was good reason for people to search for these missing elements as there appeared to be a gap based on atomic weights, with most of them being discovered relatively quickly with the exception of Francium which was the most radioactive. Since it was in the middle of this gap and Thorium and Uranium beyond it are a lot more stable, the relative radioactivities of elements appear to be the important incremental trend of the table as we get lower. You could say that Thorium begins an island of stability, but that name is usually reserved for a theorized set of isotopes among those fancy new elements that were recently discovered in the 110s. The island of primordial radioactive elements could instead by said to be separated by a band of highly radioactive non-primordial elements from the largely stable lighter pre-Lead elements. (This band can be seen in yellow at the bottom left hand corner of the graph)
Thorium
The increasing stability of these elements means they can start to have more practical uses. Thorium while radioactive has a half-life of approximately the age of the universe so there is still a lot of it kicking around. This property actually makes it good for determining the age of samples taken from marine environments. The reason this works is that there is oddly just a lot of Thorium and Uranium floating around in the oceans. Enough that one day it might be economical to extract it from sea water if we ever ran out of Uranium or Thorium ores.
This means that the only real issue to the sustainability of nuclear power is the spent fuel. The main issue for the spent fuel being radioactive is that only a small percentage of the fuel is ever actually used up, meaning the uranium can usually be reprocessed into fuel rods to be used again until it is finally used up. Of course there will always be some materials which are not useful, but we really should see nuclear waste as more of a valuable resource than a total burden.
Another alternative is to use the Thorium fuel cycle rather than Uranium fuel cycle. Nuclear decay is a one step forward, two steps back kind of deal, where beta decay emits an electron while replacing a neutron with a proton which increments the atomic number by 1. Alpha decay emits two protons out of the atom which brings it back down by 2. A decay cycle will have various alpha and beta decays until the atomic number gets low enough that it reaches the lighter stable elements. Since Thorium starts two below Uranium it takes less time overall to reach the stable range, and so it spends less time emitting radiation like mad while it is either +1-beta or -2-alpha decaying alternatingly.
Something that is useful is that if Thorium-232 absorbs a neutron and becomes Thorium-233, it will undergo beta decay twice passing through Proactinium-233 which is 1 higher, then after the second beta decay it is Uranium-233, and this Uranium can function as fissile material. Fissile means that rather than always absorbing a neutron when hit as the “fertile” Thorium-232 does, it may occasionally split apart instead into two different atoms.
The main issue though is one of its best strengths, namely that Thorium-232 is not fissile by itself so it is difficult to get going, Usually a bit of Plutonium that can introduce neutrons to the Thorium is used as a solution to this problem. That also means that it is easy to stop in a way that already fissile Uranium Fuel isn’t, (as you just need to isolate the Thorium from the Plutonium to make it stop) in fact there is actually evidence that in some rich uranium deposits that natural nuclear fission reactions of occurred, so a lot of effort needs to go into preventing the fuel from going undergoing fission when you don’t want it to.
Another benefit which is also an issue is that none of the products of the Thorium fuel cycle are useful for producing nuclear weapons (except the Plutonium but that isn’t being produced by it). Since Uranium nuclear power was developed as a byproduct of the Manhattan Project, there is a lot of work that has not yet been done towards getting Thorium nuclear power to work unlike with the Uranium Fuel Cycle which more or less just fell into our laps while trying to make nuclear weapons.
Thorium is not really produced in large quantities yet, but it is usually found alongside Uranium so if there was demand for it Uranium miners like Cameco (TSE:CCO) would begin producing it from the same mines.
Protactinium
Protactinium is called that because it comes before Actinium in a decay cycle. Protactinium undergoes alpha decay which emits two protons which brings the atomic number down by 2, so it skips over Thorium which is what produces the Protactinium in the first place through beta decay which increments the atomic number up by one. Protactinium doesn’t last very long though so it was difficult to find despite being theorized to exist to explain where the Actinium was coming from after some alpha particles were emitted.
It was even harder to find because for some reason we thought that it would behave like Tantalum because we didn’t think the Actinide series was a thing yet. Looking back it seems crazy to think that the development of the table wouldn’t follow the “every 2 periods the table gets longer” trend, but as I have stated this is merely an observed trend rather than something theoretically backed. The actinides seemed to present characteristics of transition metals so many thought the electrons were filling the “6d” orbitals, which is to say the third kind of wave pattern in the sixth layer of electrons. What do I mean by wave pattern? Well electrons are basically clouds, and these clouds oscillate in a way that could be described as a wave. For hydrogen with only one electron, the wave is simple, basically just like a single drum being beat at the center, falling and rising. As you add electrons you try to find the slots for it which require the least amount of extra energy. Now a drum is a 2-dimensional surface while the world exists in 3-dimensional space, but the principle is the same.
One of these available slots would be the exact same wave pattern at the same “shell layer” (think distance from nucleus) but with a different property called “spin”. This isn’t actually spin, as I stated the electron is a cloud of charge that is being a wave, so it might be more useful to think of this like “double dutch” where two jump ropes occupy the same space but are opposite to one another (I have not seen anyone else make such an analogy so perhaps I am entirely wrong for making it). We usually call these “spins” as up or down to distinguish them, but neither of them is “up” or “down”, but rather they are just always opposite … in something, what “spin” actually means is a bit of mystery, but it is where magnetism in atoms comes from so we called it spin since a moving charge produces a magnetic field and we figured if the electrons were spinning in opposite directions they would produce magnetic fields which cancels each other out, and so we just rolled with it, or should I say we spinned with it? Oftentimes it is better not to question it when we say it is like this thing is happening but it isn’t really happening because it would be kind of impossible based on other things we think it is behaving like.
Another thing that can be done with the electron is ascend it to a higher “shell” level, which is sort of like hitting a bigger drum, and with a bigger drum there is more room for the having more complicated wave patterns. The “wave pattern” thing is where two different waves can occupy the same space but rather than being opposite instead the wave is more complex, such as instead of only hitting the center of the drum you hit near the edge and the wave will oscillate different parts of the membrane at different times as it goes back and forth across the membrane rather than just having the membrane go up and down. Of course the pattern of the electron cloud wave is 3 dimensional so it can get even more complicated. The “6d” does not refer to 6 dimensions, rather it means that while hydrogen’s electron is in the first shell of the “s-type” wave pattern (and is said to be in the s-block), the most energetic electron (the last to be added if you added them according to their energy levels) in transition metals fill the “d-type” wave pattern, so the transition metals are put in the “d-block”. There is also the “p-type” and the elements with the most energetic electron in this type are in the “p-block” which is the 6by6 square on the right of the table below helium (which is in the s-block, but since it has the properties of a noble gas rather than a group 2 (second column) alkali earth metal like Magnesium or Calcium we put in on the opposite end with the other noble gases)
All the wave patterns are called orbitals even though nothing is orbiting anything, rather it is a cloud of negative charge as I said. You can sort of think of it as how likely the electron is to be present at any given location at any given time, but that is only applicable in the case that you would be trying to observe the electron directly at that moment. Until you try to observe it directly, describing it as a cloud that is at all the points at the same time rather than a single point is an acceptable way of viewing it, where the “probability density” describes how “strong” the cloud is at any position.
The p-type wave pattern kind of looks like a dumbbell. Since there are 3 dimensions the dumbbells shaped orbitals can align themselves in 3 ways where each of them try to bulge out of the others way.
Since each orbital can have 2 electrons with opposite spins this means there are 6 slots for electrons in the p-type orbitals, and combined with the 2 slots in the singular s-type orbital that makes 8 electron slots which are often the most exterior electrons. The noble gases are stable because they fill up these 8 slots (or 2 in Helium’s case as it is in the first row before the p-type becomes available) so their exteriors are complete meaning there is less opportunity for interaction.
We differentiate the interior s-type (first 2 electrons) from the exterior s-type (electrons 3 and 4 which are added first for Lithium and Beryllium) by calling the interior electrons 1s and the exterior 2s. The 2s orbitals are “double waves” in the sense that there is enough “space” for the wave to bulge twice, it is just this pattern of bulging manifests in a way that appears like ripples in a pond as it would progress beyond 2s to 3s and so forth.
The 2p dumbbell might look like it is bulging twice but you have to imagine the bulges by their distance from the nucleus. It is bulging out once on opposite ends. For 3p it bulges out twice on opposite ends so it looks like there are 4 bulges.
For 3d the wave d-type waves are more complicated. To begin with there are 4 different ways that you could organize something like 4 balloons tied together. This 3d will only bulge out at one distance from the center, where as the 3p will bulge out at two distances, and the 3s will bulge out at 3 distances.
In the above graphic you can see how if the 3 graphs were to overlap the bulges would be try to be a maximal amplitudes at different distances. In the below graphic you can see that this also applies to the 2s, 2p, and 1s, but it is easier to see the pattern if you are only looking at orbitals of the same shell number. The peaks are slightly off from one another such that the small peak of 3p is in between the two small peaks of 3s, and the peak of 3d is in the largest depression of both 3p and 3s. They are not in the exact centers of the depressions but it organizes such that the sum of all of them including 2s, 2p, and 1s they all find a place.
The usage of the term shell seems to imply that the atom is a bit like a layered candy where everything in a shell layer is neatly packed in surface around the previous shell layers, but you can clearly see that the outer shell electrons “sometimes” will be in the same space as the lower shells. The reason this works is that the electron locations is a modeled as a probability. If you think of this in terms of planets where say Earth normally is at Earth’s distance from the Sun, but it could sometimes blink into existence at Mercury’s orbit range, Earth would not crash into Mercury because there is only a chance that mercury will be at the specific location in its orbit at any given time. So earth might blink out of earth range and into mercury range but at the opposite end for instance. Also since that all the is being modelled is a probability, they will never actually ever crash into each other even in the off chance that they would “choose” to be at the same place because they aren’t actually ever choosing to be at a single location anyway (until they are observed directly).
Instead as I said this manifests as overlapping probability clouds but it is useful to imagine the electron blinking in and out of existence at the various ranges, and the amplitude representing how often it “chooses” to blink into existence at that space. The way the “shielding” I have discusses works is that the probability clouds sort of functions in a similar way to clouds of charge, so while the “outermost” shell of electrons will sometimes be furthest away and thus loosely held meaning not much energy is required to remove them, they also can “spend time” closer to the nucleus. This can explain why “collisions” between atoms don’t always happen, as the “probability” that the “outermost” electrons will actually be at the predicted outermost distance is not 100%, so it is possible to “miss” what could otherwise have been a collision based on a simple atomic radius measurement.
Electrons only become point-like when you measure them, and since to measure something you need to interact with it, any interaction with the electron constitutes a measurement. While the electron was point-like for the instant of the measurement if it were to bond after interacting with a colliding atom, it might for instance form a hybrid orbital where it becomes shared between the two atoms. For something like carbon we call this a sp3 orbital as the s and p valence orbitals merge to form a tetrahedral orbital in four directions where each direction can be a covalent bond. This tetrahedral sp3 while it would look like 4 balloons, it is different in that the balloons form out like a pyramid and each end would be a different electron, where as with the d orbital each electron occupies a plane with four balloons all for itself (and its opposite spin partner).
Now I stated the d orbital that looks like 4 balloons tied together arranges itself in a plane four different ways, but there is also a fifth d-block orbital that looks like a dumbbell but additionally has a ring in-between the two ends. This ring is approximately the same distance from the nucleus as the other bulges and so it still follows the pattern where there is a single distance away from the nucleus that reaches a local maximum. The difference between all five orbitals however is which angle outside the nucleus that this maximum reaches rather than how far, as the five orbitals try to avoid each other. With two spins for each orbital this means the d-block has room for 10 electrons, so in combination with the 6 p-block and 2 s-block, there are 18 electrons in total.
The s-type has as many bulges as its shell layer number, while the p has 1 less, and the d will have 2 less, and the f has 3 less, as such the f only exists when there are already 4 shells, d with 3, and p with 2. Naturally this would lead to the conclusion that the periodic table would get longer in every period or row, but with the exception of the second row, this only happens every 2 rows, such that the d-block only starts to be used in the fourth period and so this is the first row with 18 elements, where as the p-block get used in the second, while the s-block gets used in the first. The reason for this is obviously that the s-block is the only block that exists in the first period, and the p-block only becomes available to be used in the second period. The question arises why does 4s fill before 3d? Well it is because the Aufbau principle states that the lowest energy orbital is used first rather than the one closest to the nucleus. In fact we have seen that 3d is actually closer than 3s most of the time. The more complicated waves are more energetic than the simpler ones, in part precisely because there is more of them so they have to avoid each other more. It also could be said that since the simple waves do exist closer to the nucleus in their interior bulges they are at least partially closer to it than the more complicated waves at least some of the time, so they can be more tightly held.
The Madelung rule states that the order the orbital will be filled is by the sum of the shell layer (n) with a ranking of the subshell (l), where s = 0, p = 1, d = 2, and f = 3. The first red arrow is how they are filled up to Helium (1s), while the second is up till Berylium (2s), the third is until Magnesium (3s). The fourth period which is the first to contain transition metals thus fills 4s first, then fills 3d, and finishes with 4p, with 5s being the first to be filled in the next period. The subshells which get filled within the same period are circled below.
Thus a period is a single arrow within the graphic with the exception that instead of the final s-block the previous s-block is used instead at the beginning. With this Madelung rule arrow model, you can see that the 3d does not get used until the fifth red arrow, which mostly corresponds to the 4th period. The sixth red arrow which corresponds to the 5th period does not pass through 4f so it does not use f because there is no 3f, so f does not get used until the seventh red arrow which corresponds to the 6th period.
Now there are exceptions to this rule because the exact energies of each orbital can differ depending on how many orbitals in a subshell have already been filled, as well as because of Hund’s rule which states that electrons prefer to fill a completely different orbital rather than double up with an electron with a different spin provided that there are multiple orbitals available of the same energy level. The exact energy of each orbital is thus a product of many different considerations, but the rule is well behaved enough that we can organize the periodic table around it. One notable exception is Palladium, which actually has all of its 5s electrons migrate to instead completely fill up all ten of the 4d electrons, meaning that instead of having 2 in the fifth shell and 16 in the fourth shell, it has 18 in the fourth shell and lacks any electrons in the fifth shell. This may contribute to its low reactivity as the 18-electron rule is a particularly stable combination for an outer shell since it is similar to that of a noble gas. Palladium is still considered to be part of period 5 even though it does not contain any electrons in the fifth shell because beyond this exception the elements of similar atomic weights behave as expected.
If you didn’t understand any of that I don’t blame you. All that is necessary to know is that people thought Protactinium and the other Actinides were going to be transition metals rather than similar to Lanthanides because they thought that the 6d electron orbitals were being filled rather than the 5f, but it was developments into quantum theory which suggested that 5f would be favorable. In actuality it appears as if Actinium and Thorium do in fact fill up 6d, giving 9 and 10 electrons into the 6th shell in addition to 2 in the 7th, while Protactinium is the first to fill 5f, such that there are 20 in the 5th shell, 9 in the 6th, and 2 in the seventh. This is because the atoms treat the Madelung rule more like a guideline than an actual rule. Plutonium does eventually follow it as it has 8 in the 6th shell despite prior elements having 9, but the reason the rule is said to hold is that the 6d does not begin to get consistently filled until the Madelung rule would predict it. The loose nature of the Madelung rule could also mean that instead of filling the 8th shell, elements beyond 118 might just start filling 6f or 7d rather than 8s because electrons laugh at our mortal means of understanding their divine choice of orbitals and may do something that doesn’t fit into the current periodic table at all.
Now at the time the periodic table was still being formed, the Actinide concept was not a forgone conclusion, which is why finding Protactinium was so difficult because people were not expecting it to just start migrating a 6d electron into 5f and then continue adding them to 5f. It was only with the discovery of trans-uranic elements such as the mentioned plutonium exhibiting properties similar to uranium rather than their potentially corresponding transition metal that it became clear that the actinide concept was the only way to explain any of this.
Producing Protactinium is usually done by isolating it from nuclear waste material because there will always be some of it as the material passes through its decay chains, but it requires a lot of waste to produce (tons of waste needed for grams of protactinium, and you will still have tons of waste left when you are done) and it doesn’t even last that long after you isolate it so it isn’t used for much when uranium or thorium have similar properties and there isn’t that many situations where you would want an intermediate of both rather than either one.
Uranium
Uranium is heavy. I had the opportunity to lift some in the same room as a desk once used by Ernest Rutherford and I can tell you it is far denser than the lead sample they had alongside it. It was of course covered in some lead and fabric to block radiation but I can assure you that the covering could not explain the discrepancy because these were big blocks so the surface area to volume ratio was low.
This means that beyond its nuclear properties, “depleted” uranium is also used as ammunition that is more destructive than lead rounds as it can pack a heavier punch in the same sized munition shell. The uranium is “depleted” in the sense that is is Uranium-238 devoid of any Uranium-235 which is the isotope that “enriched uranium” wants to maximize, so maybe it could have been called “impoverished uranium”. In actuality though both depleted and enriched uranium contains both Uranium-238 and Uranium-235 just in different concentrations. Natural uranium is 0.72% Uranium-235 and the rest is Uranium-238, while depleted uranium is only 0.3% Uranium-235. Enriched Uranium for a nuclear reactor is about 5% Uranium-235, while weapons grade Highly Enriched Uranium is over 85% Uranium-235. When enriching uranium you are left with far more depleted uranium so they needed to do something with it so they decided in might be a good idea to just lob it at their enemies in situations where they aren’t lobbing the enriched stuff at them. The problem is that depleted uranium is still radioactive so it causes some of the same issues as the enriched uranium bomb might cause, therefore it is questionable if it should be allowable within the rules of war to use depleted uranium ammunition because its effects can linger long after the battle is over.
A long time ago the natural percentage of uranium-235 was higher, in fact there is at least one case of an entirely natural nuclear fission process taking place in Gabon at the Oklo Mine where over a billion years ago ground water in uranium deposit slowed down emitted neutrons enough that a self-sustaining fission reaction would occur until it heated the water to evaporation which brought it to an end. After cooling and refilling with water the reaction restarted, and this continued for hundreds of thousands of years in an approximately three hour cycle. The reason this was possibly is that 1.7 billion years ago when the reaction occurred the percentage of naturally occurring Uranium-235 was over 3%. We know this happened due to the abnormal percentage of uranium-235 remaining in samples from the area. Under normal circumstance over the billions of years the 3% would have dropped to the usually 0.72%, but in this case it is as low as 0.44%, suggesting some of it has been “used up”.
The Congo basin is a rich source of Uranium, in fact prior to the end of WW2 the uranium for the Manhattan project came from a mine called Shinkolobwe in Katanga, which is the part of the Democratic Republic of the Congo which looks like it is cutting into Zambia. Although the US eventually enlisted a Vanadium mining company to extract some from the US southwest late into the war. The German nuclear program operated exclusively with uranium from Katanga which just so happened to be on the docks in Belgium when they captured it. The Soviet nuclear program was started with this same uranium that they captured from the Germans, although after the war was over they opened their own uranium mines in the eastern block countries it occupied, including East Germany, although these mines were far less abundant than the Katangan mine, given that now there was a consistent demand for the element the more involved mining became practical. The company which held the pre-WW2 monopoly was the Belgian Union Minière du Haut-Katanga which is now called Umicore (EBR:UMI).
Neptunium
There seems to be a pattern where in the Actinide series one element is obscure while the next is used more often. Actinium gives way to Thorium, Protactinium has nothing on Uranium, and Neptunium is always overshadowed by its big brother Plutonium (which is a bit ironic since in planetary terms Pluto got a demotion. Although Cerium is named after the Dwarf Planet Ceres which was discovered as a planet in 1801 and the element was discovered in 1803, but Ceres was later demoted to an asteroid in 1850s when more asteroids were discovered in its orbit. Ceres was then promoted to a Dwarf Planet when Pluto was downgraded to that in 2006. Interestingly Cerium was used as the material for the crucible that held Uranium and Plutonium in the Manhattan project.)
Neptunium is notable for being the first trans-Uranic element, which is a group of elements after Uranium (obviously) which were created synthetically through the Manhattan Project or in subsequent research. We now know that naturally occurring Neptunium must exist briefly as a decay product in naturally occurring uranium ores because in 1951 Plutonium was detected in nature and Plutonium can only come about from Uranium by passing through Neptunium by 2 beta decays which transform neutrons into protons by emitting electrons as beta particles. After searching for it the Neptunium was detected the next year in 1952.
However at the time of the Manhattan project it was believed that they were creating entirely new elements so they chose to name these trans-uranic elements after the trans-uranus planets (or dwarf planet in pluto’s case) both of whom were discovered by first predicting they would be there mathematically before being found. The naming scheme for Jupiter, Saturn, and Uranus followed the names of the son, father, grandfather of Roman gods, while Neptune and Pluto are the brothers of Jupiter. There is something poetic in naming the “bonus” elements in sequence based on the names of the “bonus” planets. In either case there was extra elements or planets to be found, and it was quite lucky that the heaviest element to be found out of sequence was discovered at around the same time as the planet Uranus in the late 1700s for them both to be named that, which left room for more elements to come after it just as more planets had come after it (Pluto was not discovered until 1930 so it was relatively new at the time of the Manhattan project, thus by common practice naming a new element after the new planet made it a suggestion and since there was two newly discovered elements and the previously heaviest known element was Uranium it just made sense to name the middle element Neptunium to complement Plutonium).
The Neptunium and Plutonium created by nuclear bomb tests (as well as in the explosions at Hiroshima and Nagasaki) was scattered into the environment such that it is estimated there is 2500kg of the long lasting Neptunium isotopes in the world just lying around (in contrast with the trace amounts of the short-lived naturally occurring isotopes due to neutron capture in uranium ores).
Neptunium’s property of readily bonding with minerals when after dissolving in the environment means that it is of particular concern when dealing with nuclear waste as you have to make sure it does not come into contact with air to oxidize and then dissolve in water and leach into the environment. To add further problems is that it can be absorbed by concrete. The products of the atomic bombs can also get trapped in steel from the atmosphere, but only when it is forged, so pre-1940s steel is called low-background Steel as it is useful when you need devices that have high sensitivity for detecting radioactive nucleotides. The supply of this low-background steel was usually found in sunken world war one German battleships, although it is becoming increasingly less needed as the ban on testing is bringing background radiation back down to pre-1940s levels.
Plutonium
Plutonium powder is flammable. Not only that but in powder form it can catch fire when exposed to air at room temperature if it had been previously exposed to moisture. This isn’t even the property we are talking about when we speak of plutonium bombs. You can’t say nature didn’t warn us against putting too much of it in one place. (Although wanting to put it all in one place is precisely why we discovered it in the first place so we have never been ones to listen to nature’s warnings.)
Beyond its explosive properties Plutonium is interesting for being a metal which has high levels of resistance to the movement of electricity. I’m sure this will be taken advantage of for all sorts of consumer products any day now. Currently it is used for heat based power production for long lasting probes because the half-life of Plutonium-238 is 87.74 years. In fact it was apparently used to power pacemakers. The reason this didn’t cause immediate death is because Plutonium undergoes Alpha decay, which emits a helium nucleus which does not go very far and could be blocked with even a sheet of paper. Very little of the more dangerous gamma radiation is emitted from this particular isotope so grandpa isn’t going to be turning into hulk anytime soon (not to mention its use is being phased out anyway.)
Plutonium is the final element we have observed in nature. All the other ones have only been synthetically produced by humans.
Americium, Curium
We are in the home stretch of the lesser known radioactive elements. Technically Curium was produced before Americium, so Americium is the fourth element discovered during the Manhattan project.
Curium is produced by bombarding Plutonium with Alpha particles which makes it go up by two, while bombarding Plutonium with neutrons makes it undergo beta decay with turns a neutron into a proton while emitting an electron, which makes it go up by one, thus making Americium.
While it does not naturally occur in nature, it has probably been introduced to nature through decay of other materials in the nuclear tests or reactor leaks and this has been confirmed in the analysis of the leftovers from the 1952 hydrogen-bomb tests, which also included Einsteinium, Californium, Berkelium, and Fermium.
Berkelium, Californium
Berkelium was discovered in 1949 when Americium was bombarded by alpha particles which made it go up by two. The next element, Californium, was discovered the next year by bombarding Curium with alpha particles. Seems like a convenient way of synthesizing new elements: just bombard and then bombard it again, but heavier and with intent, and bam new elements.
Einsteinium, Fermium
Einsteinium and Fermium were produced in that hydrogen bomb test in 1952 previously discussed. As such their discovery was kept a secret. A Swedish team in 1954 was able to make some Fermium by bombarding Uranium with Oxygen atoms which seems more creative than the previous methods.
However when the results of the hydrogen bomb test were declassified in 1955 they took precedence so the American team got to name it. Had they not this could have meant that Sweden would have added even more elements to its impressively long discovery list for such a small country.
Einsteinium is currently produced in the milligrams per year in special reactors that decay Californium as when it emits a beta particle it becomes Einsteinium.
Fermium, number 100, is the last element that can be produced by bombarding lighter elements with neutrons, as both Einsteinium and Fermium can be eventually produced through neutron bombarded of Plutonium, you just got really mean it, and not let up, you know. Perseverance!
Mendelevium
By bombarding Einsteinium with helium they were able to produce a whole 17 atoms of element 101 in 1955. That was enough however so it was eventually named Mendelevium after the Russian guy who invented the original periodic table.
Nobelium
Nobelium was discovered in 1966, five years after the next element Lawrencium. Nobelium (atomic number or Z = 102) was produced by bombarding Uranium (Z=92) with Neon (Z=10) atoms.
Lawrencium
Lawrencium is the final element in the actinide series. All elements beyond it are called superheavy elements and the immediate transactinides are technically transition metals, although I doubt given how short a time they last before decaying that it even matters.
It was synthesized by bombarding Californium (Z=98) with Boron (Z=5).
Rutherfordium
Rutherfordium was synthesized by the Americans by bombarding Californium with Carbon in 1969. Seems like a reasonable methods since Carbon comes after Boron, but the Russians claimed to have synthesized it in 1964 by bombarding Plutonium (Z=94) with Neon (Z=10). These situations tended to be the case for the elements beyond Fermium, which is why the naming controversies for them are called the Transfermium Wars.
Dubnium
The naming dispute for this one was not resolved until 1993, eventually settling on the town in Russia which hosts the research center called Dubna (Although it would not officially get that name until 1997.)
In 1968 the Soviet team bombarded Americium with Neon (which certainly would sound like a cold war drama if you didn’t know what we were talking about). In 1970 an American team bombarded Californium with Nitrogen (which might sound like the marketing campaign for a fast and furious sequel if you didn’t know what we were talking about.)
Seaborgium
This was made by bombarding Californium (Z=98) with Oxygen (Z=8). Seaborgium was named after the American scientist Seaborg who was instrumental in synthesizing many prior elements, and it was named after him was he was still alive, which is a honour he shares with the Russian-Armenian scientist Oganessian who gives the name to the final element number 118.
Bohrium
Bohrium was made by bombarding Bismuth (Z=83) with Chromium (Z=24). What is interesting is unlike the prior superheavy elements, this one was produced by combining two elements which are otherwise stable. As we know technically Bismuth-209 that was used has a half-life of 19 quintillion years, but Bohrium was also produced by bombarding Lead-208 (Z=82) with Manganese-55 (Z=25), which when taken together have the same number of neutrons and protons as the Bismuth-209 and Chromium-54.
Hassium, Meitnerium
Hassium was made by bombarding Lead (Z=82) with Iron (Z=26). Meitnerium was made by bombarding Bismuth (Z=83) with Iron (Z=26). Convenient that both lead and bismuth can be bombarded with something.
Darmstadium, Roentgenium
Similarly Darmstadium was synthesized by bombarding Lead (Z=82) with Nickel (Z=28), and Roentgenium was synthesized by bombing Bismuth (Z=83) with Nickel (Z=28). As element 111, Roentgenium is notable for being in the center of the theorized “island of stability” which means that it has isotopes which have half-lives over a minute instead of isotopes with half-lives of seconds like the other elements, or even in the milliseconds like some of the heaviest elements.
The “island of stability” breaks up the monotony of the periodic trend being increasingly shorter half-lives, and the reprieve might have been just enough to make it so we could finish the final row of the periodic table before the half-lives became too short to detect. There is nothing about the periodic table that guaranteed it would be interesting. The elements could have been boring with tortuously similar properties. Now of course in a way they are exactly that. Most elements have the property of having mass, conducting electricity, bonding with other elements ect, and where it is interesting is often where an element does not do those things, so our idea of “interesting” is relative to what we observe, so of course we are quite adept at finding interesting behaviours as those would be the only ones we notice, and we don’t mention what we take for granted. The fact that this “island of stability” is below noble metals like gold, silver, and copper which are noted for their low reactivity could be interesting, or it could just be a giant coincidence. Nonetheless this island is quite a pathetic rock outcrop at high tide so what could have been far more interesting for potential analogies to this being radioactive super-gold ended up being merely an interesting footnote as it is not likely we will have use for something we lose half of every couple minutes. On a non-human timescale however…
Copernicium
Copernicium was made by bombarding lead (Z=92) with zinc (z=30). Copernicium, provided it can stick around without decaying, might have high volatility (which is a measure how likely it is to vapourize into a gas at room temperature), but when not a gas it might behave like mercury and be a liquid given that it is directly above it. A radioactive superheavy liquid that can vapourize at will would certainly be an interesting science fiction concept, but we can’t have nice things. People will insist on just naming their stuff something stupid like unobtanium and give it any plot convenient property they need.
Nihonium
Technically Nihonium is a post-transition metal in the p-block, but how it actually behaves is anyone’s guess for now. Interestingly it was the second to last element to be discovered despite being only element number 113 and there being five more heavier than it. It was not making it that was the problem so much as confirming that it was made that proved difficult, as reproducibility in science is important. It was thought that a single atom was produced during an attempt to synthesize element 114 by bombarding Plutonium with Calcium in 1998 but the specific decay properties were not reproducible. The specific event is called electron capture which is the reverse of beta decay where instead of being emitted by a proton turning into a neutron, an electron is absorbed turning a proton into a neutron. This is a far less common decay event than either beta or alpha decay so people were naturally skeptical.
Instead some was detected when element 115, Moscovium, underwent Alpha decay. The Moscovium was made from Americium bombarded with Calcium. To make Nihonium directly Bismuth was bombarded with Zinc in 2003 but a single atom was not detected until 2004. It was this near year long experiment by the Japanese which was taken as a definite synthesis. As a result of their persistence they got to name Nihonium after the name for their country in their own language.
Flerovium, Moscovium, Livermorium, Tennesine, Oganesson
All the rest of the elements were produced by bombarding Plutonium through Californium with Calcium. The order in which they were discovered was Flerovium (1998), Livermorium (2000), Oganesson (2002), Moscovium (2003), Nihonium was second last, and the final element was Tennessine in 2009.
It in unknown whether these elements will have the properties predicted by those below them in the periodic table, in part because their half life is so short and they are so difficult to produce that we have only ever produced a countably small number of individual atoms of them, never enough to test for these properties. While we may not discover any elements after them there is still so much work left to be done to truly discover the properties of the rest of the elements and see if any more periodic trends are observable. While this journey has been long I hope you have not found it boring, for it was only the story of everything that ever was, is, or can be.
