Soviet scandium aluminum alloys / aluminum baseball bats

Worldwide scandium production is only 2,000 tons/year. The high-strength aluminum alloys for baseball bats derive from Soviet aluminum-scandium research.

If we look at structural materials usage — this is something I put together for this course a couple years ago. Steel right now is about one and a half billion tons a year, and the next closest metal — I said steel is 95 tons out of every hundred tons of metal made in the world. The next closest is aluminum at 1.75 percent. 45 million tons of aluminum is what the Aluminum Association says is the worldwide production. The next largest is copper, at 1.2 percent of the total. I Googled scandium once — worldwide production of scandium is 2,000 tons a year. What do you use scandium for? Baseball bats. It's an alloying element. The Soviets developed it to get very high strength aluminum alloys, and the highest strength aluminum alloys go into baseball bats. That's another story.