What's The Deal With Platinum?

Sponge forms of various metals are most often made by blending aluminum with another metal, casting it into ingots, grinding it to a granular consistency, and then leaching some of the aluminum out of the combined metal with aqueous sodium hydroxide. Partial leeching creates many voids in the metal particles that look just like the voids in a natural sponge. The sponge metal is then water washed a few times to remove most of the caustic soda and stored in metal cans under water. Most of them are quite pyrophoric and will spontaneously burst into flame if allowed to become dry in air. Raney nickel is a good example of such sponge metal forms.

Palladium and platinum are routinely used as catalysts in pollution clean-up devices, such as catalytic converters but also for LARGE industrial converters such as might be used on industrial incinerators or coal / oil fired power plants. Additionally, the chemical and oil refining industries use quite a lot of both of these as catalysts for various chemical reactions, including reformulated gasoline.

I'm thinking that a lot of people are assuming that the US economy is sliding into recession and that this will cause the various industries that use these metals to buy less of them. With less demand, the price would likely drop. I'm not convinced that this is happening. It could but the signs that favor it seem to be fairly weak at the moment. The recent up-tick in employment, for example, does not signal a recession at this point.

Figures don't lie, but liars figure.

I still think Silver is a way better buy for long term future investments over all the common PMs. Within 4-10 years the dry up will happen. Its not JUST a wealth storage it is one of the most necessary metals of the modern world. Its industrial, technological and astrophysical properties are unrivaled. You can not build modern space ships with out silver. Its antiseptic uses, its electro-conductivity, solar panels need it... without silver the world and the future would be drastically different.

Gold is nice, I dont think it will lose its value in the eyes of the world in my lifetime. However silver is not only a shiny pretty metal, its a invaluable one whos supply lessens every day.

All natural resources are subject to this. Realistically, there is only so much of each resource available to us on this planet. At some point, we will consume all that is easily and cheaply available to us. I believe that we may very well be approaching that point now and over the next 5-10 years. Once we have exploited all that is easily and cheaply available, we will need to find new supplies that are not so cheap or easy to develop. This likely means digging MUCH deeper mines, mining the sea bed, or even tunneling beneath the sea to find and extract the resources we need. Further out in time, we will be mining the moon and perhaps even the asteroid belt for the minerals we need. While all of these alternative production methods seem possible, none of them will be cheap. Because of this, we can expect some very large increases in the prices of many of these elements.

Sea water itself contains quite a lot of elements that are of importance to us. Unfortunately, these are very dilute so we would have to handle very large volumes of water in order to collect these resources.

While this is possible, it is likely that we would need to use huge amounts of electricity for these processes. For that to be economical, we would very likely need to develop commercial nuclear fusion. We will need fusion anyway, so it isn't as if it is a single use development. The amounts of coal, oil, and gas on this planet are very large but also finite. They WILL run out someday and we cannot wait until that happens to develop suitable alternatives.

With all the talk of alternative energy sources, I don't recall ever seeing anyone talk about what could be a major drawback.

We know that matter can neither be created nor destroyed. By extension, the same is true of energy, which is simply another form of matter.

When we talk about "green" and "renewable" energy sources, we're changing the biosphere, though no one ever mentions that. For example, if we use wind to create electric, we're slowing down the wind to power the windmills. Ditto using tides for electric.

Solar power? The heat and light absorbed by solar cells used to be absorbed by the earth. Geothermal removes heat from the earth and adds it to the atmosphere.

In the old days, fans provided enough cooling to get by. Today, when cities of millions of people use AC to cool buildings by 10-30°, that heat is pushed outside, making it even more necessary to have AC. In addition, both the AC and electric generated to run them add waste heat.

I don't see anyone looking into these changes.

Humans use about 18TW of energy directly. The earth absorbs 89 Peta watts. That means that if we replaced all energy on earth with solar, we would use a massive 0.02% of the incoming energy. I expect that would have next to 0 impact on the earth. Especially since the earth's surface already reflects about 8%