Lutetium (Lu)

Lutetium metal ingot - one troy ounce - .995 bullion      Though independently found by three scientists in 1907 as an impurity in ytterbia, its discovery was eventually credited to the French scientist Georges Urbain who named it lutecium, derived from the Latin translation of his home country’s capital of Paris. In 1949 the spelling was changed to lutetium. Lutetium is one of the rarest of the rare-earth metals with only about 10 tonnes of its oxide being produced worldwide each year with a much smaller amount of the pure metal ever distilled. Due to its expense and rarity there are few commercial uses of lutetium to date, but it is used to some extent in the petroleum, chemical, electronic and medical industries. Monazite is the primary ore from which lutetium is obtained, yet this mineral only contains about 0.0001% lutetium. It is very expensive to produce, yet when compared with the cost of gold of which about 2500 tonnes are mined each year, it is much less expensive. We have a