Soviet scandium aluminum alloys research; Sumitomo scandium oxide production initiative

There are lots of externalities. There are political externalities. I passed around those neodymium-iron-boron magnets, and rare-earth metals are used in a wide variety of things. They're not really that rare. They're called rare earth because they're in the middle of the periodic table and they were not that easy to extract because they have very strong affinity for oxygen. Scandium has the strongest affinity of any metal for oxygen, and scandium, because of its great affinity for oxygen, currently costs about $2,000 a pound and is not used as a structural material. But it could be used at about a tenth or two-tenths of a percent in the next generation of aluminum alloys for aircraft. The problem is, you put a tenth of a percent or two-tenths of a percent scandium at $2,000 a pound into an aluminum alloy and you just doubled the price of the aluminum alloy. Even though the scandium is one-thousandth or one five-hundredth the volume of the aluminum alloy, that amount of scandium is equal in cost to the rest of the alloy.