🚀 go-pugleaf

Gary mistated the concentration of platinum at Sudbury.  It's about 1
ppm, and would not be worth mining were it not for the copper and
nickel.  The platinum-rich part of the layered ultramafics in South
Africa hits several ounces per ton.  Placer deposits can be much richer
but are limited.  It would be interesting to know the platinum
concentration in tropical nickel laterite deposits.
 
Detecting platinum is actually nontrivial, as, on a small scale, its
concentration in rocks can be rather nonuniform.  Just picking up a
rock and sending it to the lab for analysis won't do; you must grind
up tons to get a decent sample.

Automotive catalytic converters contain a bit less than 3 grams of
PGEs, mostly platinum, with some palladium and rhodium.

The cost of platinum is currently somewhere around $350/oz, not $500.

If we ever go to a full-nuclear economy, a significant source of the
PGEs ruthenium, rhodium and palladium will be from reprocessed nuclear
waste.  A 1 GWe reactor operated for a year should produce on the
order of tens of kilograms of each of these, particularly ruthenium.

	Paul F. Dietz
	dietz@cs.rochester.edu