Friday 1 June 2012

Germanium Coins

Here is a Germanium coin/pellet imported from China and is one of 500 for sale. 
To give a sense of scale I put a 2pence piece in the picture.  It really is quite small and weighs 0.3gm

I tried to get larger coins but this was the biggest they made. It's an interesting metal.  It's not dangerous and it's supposed to have healing qualities but they said that about Arsenic.  :P    
I don't recommend ingesting this metal.  People are doing some strange thing with colloidal silver, which is supposed to be safe but I saw a youtube video of a man who's skin turned blue and it didn't look very healthy.  


China as always is the main producer of this metal and I haven't found any other supplier of this metal.  They have a monopoly it seems.  That said, if there are other nations producing Zinc then they may refine Germanium too.
I tried finding an annual production tonnage for this metal and I found 60tons.  That is a very small amount, considering China alone produces 300 tons of Gold a year.  

Germanium is mainly used as a semi conductor, but you'll probably get better information from watching the man with the big hair in the video below.

Would the world notice if this metal was unavailable or in short supply?  YUP!   Fiber-optics, infra red and solar cell technology need Germanium.

More information can be found at Wikipedia.


www.buycopper.co.uk










No comments:

Post a Comment