Quote: Find me a forge and some titanium... that would be better than floating aluminum coins on water
I can tell you've never had much to do with metal-fires, or ye'd nae be saying things like that. Nobody who deals with flammable metals like titanium, magnesium or even aluminium treats burning metal with anything other than cautious respect. I've only ever done the Class D Fire Extinguisher training course once, and once was enough.
Here's a YouTube video of some trainee firemen starting a titanium fire, letting it burn for a while, then going to considerable efforts with a specialist fire extiguisher to put it out.
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Quote: On the subject of aluminum, I remember my geology teacher saying it used to be expensive to process ore to get aluminum, so it was considered a semi- to full precious metal, malleable, almost impossible to corrode, sounds like gold aside from the light weight. The Washington monument was originally caped by a solid pyramid of aluminum, because it was so rare.
Correct. And the French emperor Napoleon III (ruled 1852-1870) had solid gold cutlery for his regular houseguests, but for his extra-special visitors he had a set of aluminium cutlery for them to use.
It was not until the Hall-Heroult Process was invented in 1886 that a commercially viable means of mass-producing aluminium became available. The Hall-Heroult process requires a large supply of cryolite (sodium hexafluoroaluminate), which occurred naturally on Earth in extractable quantities in only one place: Ivigtut, Greenland. This supply of naturally-occurring cryolite has been mined out since the 1980s; it's a good thing that we can now make synthetic cryolite, so long as we have enough aluminium metal to begin with. But if we ever fall into a New Dark Age that lasts long enough that all our aluminium metal corrodes away, we might never be able to economically refine aluminium again. The Aluminium Age can only happen on Earth once.
Don't say "infinitely" when you mean "very"; otherwise, you'll have no word left when you want to talk about something really infinite. - C. S. Lewis
Quote: By now possibly every country on Earth has tried every possible metal for coinage. I wouldn't doubt it if even radioactive materials have been tried. Picture that. All your coins would be easily found in the dark since they would be glowing. And get enough together and they just blow themselves up. No waste. Of course there would always be those that oomplain about looseing their hair from their coins. I think someone in the past had a post about all the different metals used in coinage.
I wouldn't be surprised if some particularly imaginative NCLT mint already made coins with a radioactivity-based lighting (probably something to do with tritium - IIRC it's the safest). In fact, I would be surprised if it hadn't been done yet (on that thought, anyone know how did the glow-in-the-dark effect on these Canadian dinosaur coins work? I don't know much of the details). I've definitely seen a list of metals used for coins somewhere (did you know a Chinese province issued coins in antimony?) That said, from the lists I've seen, I certainly remember a metal being mentioned that has no immediate problems in being used for coins but just never was (looking at one of the lists, it probably was either cobalt or hafnium; a few of the more expensive platinum-group metals were apparently never used either). There's some company (don't remember) that is aiming to produce and sell coin-shaped tokens in as many different elements as possible. IIRC they're still missing a few (of those stable enough to make anything in), but not many.
There are some titanium coins Austria 100 Schilling KM 3073 (be-met cent is titanium) British Virgin Islands 5 dollar KM 284, 75 dollar KM 285 Gibraltar Crown KM 928 Luxembourg 10 Euro KM 99
Almost did. 1942 US Pattern Cents, made out of plastic. Sure glad they went with zinc plated steel instead.
Back in the 30's and/or 40's there were a lot of States that used Mills. In Missouri they were both plastic and metal. Not sure but think the metal was Aluminum. They were in $0.001 and $0.005 pieces. The plastic ones had a tendency to bend easily. As to radio active material for coinage. Remember those glow in the dark numbers on watches some time back. Many people in the watch companies ended up with radiation poisoning. Plastic coins would never work. To easy to counterfeit. Get jamed in machines like vending machines. Bend to easily.
Obviously I was joking, and you forgot to mention Lithium, the stuff bursts into flame when you put WATER on it. A friend of mine in high school was a major 'pyro' he never did any arson but was a bit weird. one day in his physics class the teacher brought out some Thermite! He started drooling, they went out side and set it up, no one else understood what was about to happen so they were getting close to it (the teacher was not being negligent) but when they saw my friend standing well back they got the idea.
Another radioactive house hold item from the late 40's - 50's was orange ceramic dishes, the way they got the orange color was with a by-product of uranium processing, or just the ore that you refine to get uranium. Check Grandmas serving dishes, if any are orange and warm to the touch... take it to some nice salt cavern in the desert somewhere.
I have got a little legal-to-own tritium keychain so I can find my backpack in the dark. Very useful. You can also own up to 15 pounds of unenriched uranium metal in the United States without having to tell the government, but all I have is a green Vaseline glass (and it is a bit hot). Most alpha emitters like uranium and radium are fairly safe outside your body (although they give off radon) but if you inhale or ingest any specks of the stuff it's very bad.
Quote: all I have is a green Vaseline glass (and it is a bit hot). Most alpha emitters like uranium and radium are fairly safe outside your body
Uranium is another pyrophoric metal, ie in powdered form it can ignite spontaneously. As Nalaberong noted, the greatest hazard would be inhalation, as heavy metal isotopes tend to stick in lung tissue and slowly irradiate you. Striking uranium coins would create a lot of dust hazard!
I would guess that recent glow-in-the-dark coins such as the dinosaur series employ strontium aluminate/europium paint. This material is entirely safe to handle, quite unlike radium! Note:a lot of radium paint can be a gamma emitter, probably due to the process which derived the radium, including other isotopes. I happen to have a couple WWII aircraft dials which emit mostly gamma rays! These are not entirely safe to handle w/o precautions--just an FYI
Quote: Check Grandmas serving dishes, if any are orange and warm to the touch... take it to some nice salt cavern in the desert somewhere.
It's called Fiestaware, and it used UO3 for pigmentation. The radiation levels are fairly low and safe for occasional household use--the uranium is bound into silica glaze and will not get inhaled. Just don't use with acidic foods that may leach out uranium. Since there's very little if any spontaneous fission going on--the dishes are not warm to the touch, unless you heat them!
Yeah, don't be lighting aluminum on fire. That's nasty.
And are those Ti coins circulating coinage? I intended this to be about circulating coinage, not commemorative or collectors' coins because of the strength of Ti.
It's usually to do with cost versus benefit. Volatile base metal prices is the best constraint in recent years. Titanium would be a lot worse as it is an industrial metal.
Historically any introduction of new metals have caused confusion and the public have often rejected them. Good examples are platinum, antimony, nickel (when initially released).
These days most mints are heading towards plated steel due to the cost. China and Canada are two major countries that have shifted most coinage to plated steel coinages.
That said, I still haven't bothered to get a titanium coin for my collection even though I have some of the tougher element coinage like antimony and tantalum. http://gxseries.com/numis/coin_elem...elements.htm
On plated steel: in the Euro area, the 1, 2 and 5 cent coins are copper plated steel from the very start in 2002... and they were just following suit. In the UK the 1p and 2p coins are plated steel since 1992. The US avoided 'magnetic cents', using copper plated zinc cents from 1982 onwards. Hardly any better... And then there's the Czech republic, where all current coins are steel, plated with copper or brass for different face value.
... all of those are "Nummis non grata" in my collection.
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and some titanium... that would be better than floating aluminum coins on water 
Posted 01/18/2014 08:09 am
These are not entirely safe to handle w/o precautions--just an FYI 
