Aluminum baseball bat with scandium

Scandium is kind of interesting, $4 million a ton, and there's only about 2000 tons a year. Here is one of the largest uses of scandium — well, I don't know if it's the largest. Scandium alloy, 100 ksi aluminum, thirty percent stronger than what goes in the Boeing aircraft wing. It turns out there's a lot of money in baseball bats. That's why, if you add two-tenths of a percent scandium to an aluminum alloy, you've just doubled the price of the aluminum alloy. Scandium is $4 million a ton, which is about $2000 a pound. But scandium refines the grain size like nothing else. The Soviets tried this. They weren't worried about economics thirty years ago, and they showed that scandium can really improve the properties of aluminum alloys. So people are looking to see if they can drop the price of scandium, because it's not a rare element — there's a lot of it out there in the world. It's sort of dispersed; you've got the entropy problem. But some of the Japanese companies — Sumitomo — announced that they will produce a hundred tons of scandium oxide a year. That's what they've announced, and they actually are probably going to produce a lot more than that. People are looking at this to be able to increase the strength of aluminum in automobiles. But you can't just double the price of an automobile lightly.