（外文电子版资料）Wil McCarthy - The Technetium Rush.pdfVIP

The Technetium Rush by Wil McCarthy Materials can have many uses, some of which are talked about more openly than others * * * * Bangalore Daily News, 26 July 2011 Byline: Hemant S. Tripathi Fact: The element technetium is produced in minute quantities by red giant stars so far away that the light they’re emitting now will someday shine on your grandchildren’s grandchildren. For our purposes here, that’s far enough not to matter. Closer to home, the element is sometimes generated by the collision of molybdenum atoms and “heavy hydrogen” from the sun, or by the natural decay of uranium. These are freak occurrences, though; aside from the transuranics (which are about as stable as a life of crime), technetium is the rarest element in the natural universe and forms no known minerals. Fact: Of the thirty-two possible crystal classes, only one—the gyroidal isometric—had, until recently, never been found in the mineral world. Is it mankind that abhors a vacuum? Fact: On March 20, 2008, Delhi University-trained geologist Rakesh “Rocky” Solanki, on an apparently routine survey of the alluvial clays north of Bhilwara, Rajasthan, found a deposit of fluorescent orange crystals that he couldn’t identify, and so brought back to his Jaipur office for examination. Later named Tc solankite, the crystals were hard, translucent, vaguely lustrous and—considering their gyroidal structure and 20 percent technetium composition—quickly valued at $5,000 per gram. This is 300 times the price of platinum and twice that of clear uncut diamonds, so we’re talking about serious money here. Let’s be clear about that. Since the material had apparently washed down from the nearby Arvalli Mountains sometime in the past thousand years, Solanki’s discovery touched off, almost immediately—the greatest land rush since the Canadian