Aluminum can 'do it all.

[Von Jankmon]

Finally, unlike a lot of resources, aluminum is abundant. Its 8% of Earth's crust by weight.

Aluminium is everywhere, however it is only easily extractible from bauxite, which is quite rare.  The only bauxite reserves of any note in the Europe is in Greece and there are no sizable reserves in North America.

[Sigma]

there are no sizable reserves in North America.

That sir, is not right. Any place that has had a felsic igneous bedrock and a tropical rainforest on it in the last 150 million years has Bauxite by the gigaton.

Basically a good chunk of the Southern US and a ton of the Caribbean Islands and a ton of Central American countries (Still part of NA) have huge reserves of Bauxite.

South America has even more!

People get mad when you have to strip mine the tropical rainforest to get to it sometimes though. That's why it's smarter to go after the older areas that naturally lost their forest through climate change or even dig it offshore from parts of a coast or island that are now underwater since the beginning of the Holocene.

Places that are cold and never had equatorial/subtropical rainforests or granitic bedrock. They don't have it.

[cray]

Aluminium is everywhere, however it is only easily extractible from bauxite, which is quite rare.  The only bauxite reserves of any note in the Europe is in Greece and there are no sizable reserves in North America.

So extract aluminum from kaolin (carbon reduction, then the usual electrolysis of alumina). There's 12 billion economically viable tons of kaolin, including 100 to 200 million tons of very high grade kaolin in the US.

[Sigma]

BTW Bauxite is a composite of about 5 different minerals. 1 of them being Kaolinite 1:1 clay. :D

But if you want true Pisolitic Beauxite, that still is all over the place. I remember when I took economic geology that the reason that we don't mine locally anymore is the Caribbean stuff is easier and cheaper to ship in than mining ourselves. The US Bauxite reserves never went dry.

Estimated worldwide Bauxite reserves were around 40 billion tons total last I heard about 6 or 7 years ago. I do know what you mean by what is currently economically viable though. That is a constantly changing factor among the oil folk I talk to.

[ShadowRaven]

Hello. Canuck here.  LasT I checked we where in North America, last I checked, we also produce Alluminum by the metric buttload

[cray]

Hello. Canuck here.  LasT I checked we where in North America, last I checked, we also produce Alluminum by the metric buttload

Canada imports bauxite from other countries and then refines it into aluminum. It doesn't have significant bauxite reserves of its own. Not that the US's reserves are big compared to, say, Guiana's.

[ShadowRaven]

really? learn something new every day

[Weirdo]

Given its low cost, are there other practical hurdles to using aluminum in other areas, such as gaming minis?

[Fnord]

Pewter is better suited for molding. It has a far lower melting point (~200^oC), unlike aluminium, which melts at roughly 660^oC, that alone would make pewter quite a bit better, and if my memory serves, pewter suffers from less heat expansion/contracts less when cooling from its melted temperature to room temperature.

[cray]

What Fnord said.

Also, aluminum is pretty reactive with oxygen - as a powder, it's a common additive to explosives and solid rocket fuels. As a bulk solid, it promptly forms an impermeable oxide barrier (vs. the spongy, porous oxides you've seen on rusty cars) that is resistant to further corrosion. However, as a liquid, aluminum should be handled with some care to avoid embrittling reactions with oxygen, such as using a nitrogen cover gas.

In other words, pewter is a lot easier. :)

[Your Name Is]

When you said powder, I thought of thermit black and playing with that in high school. Granted, we needed a magnesium fuse to ignite it.

[Orin J.]

Hello. Canuck here.  LasT I checked we where in North America, last I checked, we also produce Alluminum by the metric buttload

this isn't right, we don't use the metric system for that. i'm pretty sure you mean imperial buttload.

[GreyWolfActual]

Isn't it pretty much agreed upon that the vast majority of Iridium on earth actually comes from meteorites. And that is why it is so rare. In fact it's so rare you'd be hard pressed to find another less common element.

I believe Francium is far rarer and meet the definition of a naturally occurring element, albeit one with a ridiculously short shelf life.

[Your Name Is]

Francium occurs in nature? :o


Also, isn't it technically Aluminium? :p

[Fnord]

Francium occurs naturally, and is the second rarest naturally occurring element (Astatine is rarer)

Aluminium in the UK, Aluminum in the US.

[cray]

Francium occurs in nature? :o

20-30g of Fr in Earth's crust at one time. It's a short-lived decay product of uranium and thorium.

There should be about 10g of naturally-occurring Plutonium-244 in Earth's crust, leftover from Earth's formation. I'm not sure about the incidence of Pu-239 in uranium ores, where it is produced by nuclear reactions; it occurs at the parts-per-trillion level in concentrated uranium ores.

Also, isn't it technically Aluminium? :p

We could put it to a properly democratic vote, US and UK. :)

[worktroll]

Hey! Add in all the current and ex Commonwealth countries ... Canada, Australia, ... India ...

W ;)

[ShadowRaven]

forget Canada and Australia. India alone would sway the vote.

[Ajax_Wolf]

Francium occurs in nature? :o

Only as a decay product for actinium. Francium has no stable isotopes, and the isotope with the longest half-life (~22 minutes) is Francium-223, so it doesn't stick around for long.



Edit: opps, wrong isotope.

[lucho]

interesting topic, thought I'd add a humorous 2¢

Here in Brazil (according to the UN) there is the highest rate of aluminum recycling in the world; it is as close to 100% as humanly possible (officially 99+%). How, you ask?

The homeless. Seriously. Somehow the idea reached them that gathering aluminum cans (and now, paper) and giving them to the recycling center earned them money for booze. Now, especially in beer-guzzling Rio de Janeiro, you never see cans on the ground, only street people with enormous sacks of cans. Ironic that they would be more socially responsible than the 'upright citizens'  :-X