http://www.rosbalt.com/2002/01/14/30777.html
Pricey stuff, but every vaguely reputable source claims that it is of no use in making nukes or radiological weapons. Is that correct, or do you need a few mg of a high melting metal as part of a trigger device or something ? Other than rarity, why is Osmium considered a strategic metal ?
Pravda. Hm.
According to this webpage, osmium costs about $100 per gram.
http://www.scescape.net/~woods/elements/osmium.html
According to this webpage, “Metallic osmium is hard, brittle and very difficult to make. Powdered osmium is easier to make but emits osmium tetroxide (OsO4) when it is exposed to the air. Unfortunately, osmium tetroxide smells bad and is very poisonous. Because of these problems, osmium is primarily used to make very hard alloys. Osmium alloys can be found in ball point pen tips, fountain pen tips, record player needles, electrical contacts and other devices where frictional wear must be minimized.” http://education.jlab.org/itselemental/ele076.html
At this website, 5.5 kg (5500 grams) of Osmium-187 were offered for sale:
http://www.industrycommunity.com/manufacture/mfg-2/messages/536.html
Somehow, I suspect that Pravda’s price figures are off by orders of magnitude.
At 2001 prices, Aldrich sold Osmium metal for GBP80-40 per 1g, which is something like $120.
I’m not sure about the normal isotopic distribution in osmium, which may go some way to explain the price discrepancies.
They’re having a sale on osmium at Safeway. Bismuth, too.
its a well known scam. don’t buy any
see http://debate.uvm.edu/handbookfile/WMD2002/190.htm
quote "Other nuclear shams involve Osmium-187, Philippine ‘uranium’, Southeast Asian .uranium’ as well as radiation gauges. The US states that Osmium only recently emerged as a common nuclear trafficking scam in the FSU. PNNL officials say it has no known weapons application, nor is it radioactive. Scam prices can be awesome. Candium (another fake Russian radioactive substance) sells for upwards of US$50,000/kg. One hustler tried to offload a kilogram of Osmium-187 to an Iranian agent for US$70 million. “Obviously if there weren’t takers, the market wouldn’t exist,” the specialist said. He added that there were “a lot of basket cases out there and some of them have millions of dollars”.
Scary stuff, though. I mean that if there are “a lot of basket cases out there and some of them have millions of dollars” such that there is actually a market for these cons to work in, then it won’t be long before one of them actually purchases the good stuff.
I see that the my post on the natural abundance of Os 187 has gone missing.
The non-radiocative isotope Os 187 makes up 1.67 % of the naturally occuring element. Isotopes Os 186, Os 188 make Os 187 more difficult to purify than U 235 from U 238 (0.5% vs 1.0% mass difference). Yet for some reason the Khazahks are using their hideously expensive gas centrifuges, or whatever, to purify Os 187. They’re not doing that in order to make isotopically pure pen-nibs or fudge on the geologically useful rhenium/osmium clock. (Thanks to whoever posted that) That leaves the question of what they are making the stuff for.
Rhenium/osmium clock was my observation, which also went missing. I wasn’t suggesting that, exactly. I was suggesting that because of that particular geologic dating method, detection apparatus for Os 187 may have been developed and the techniques could have commercial applications.
It’s possible, I suppose, that some quantity of the stuff is actually needed to calibrate those devices, too. That particular dating method is gaining in popularity - it’s good for VERY long range dating. You will find that Rh 187 is so SLIGHTLY radioactive that most references list it as a stable isotope. Half life 42 billion years. The blurb on the clock was here:
I did turn up an odd blurb about some Slovakian company having this process:
Judge the validity for yourself: