America's manufacturers are already dependent on foreigners for practically all their gallium, germanium, indium and scandium.
And nickel processing provides cobalt, palladium, rhodium and scandium.
The substances in question include a bunch of rare-earth metals and a few other elements which used a pinch here, a pinch there enhance the way many industrial materials function.It is not as though the rare-earth elements—scandium, yttrium and lanthanum plus the 14 so-called lanthanides are all that rare.
Hydrogen is absorbed at high temperatures by many transition metals (scandium, 21, through copper, 29; yttrium, 39, through silver, 47; hafnium, 72, through gold, 79); and metals of the actinoid (actinium, 89, through lawrencium, 103) and lanthanoid series (lanthanum, 57, through lutetium, 71) to form hard, alloy-like hydrides.
Yttria, the first rare earth to be discovered, turned out to be a mixture of oxides from which, over a span of more than a century, nine elements yttrium, scandium (atomic number 21), and the heavy lanthanide metals from terbium (atomic number 65) to lutetium (atomic number 71)—were separated.
At this point the five 3d orbitals are next in line for occupation, and their successive filling accounts for the 10 elements (from scandium to zinc) that are classified as transition elements.
Thortveitite (a scandium silicate) is the only mineral containing large amounts of scandium, about 34 percent, but unfortunately this mineral is quite rare and is not an important source of scandium.
In 1879 Cleve showed that the newly discovered scandium was the element previously predicted by D.I. Mendeleyev, who called it eka-boron.
The particulate matter in river water is an important source of silicon, aluminum, iron, titanium, rubidium, scandium, vanadium, the lanthanoids, and other elements for deep-sea sediments.
Newer experimental materials, such as scandate (an alloy of barium and scandium oxide), have been discovered with slightly lower electronic work functions.
