Some of the world’s most precious and expensive substances are metals and alloys. We can see the evidence on this infographic from the team at Kylar Mack. They listed the 65 most valuable metals and alloys per ounce. We can visually compare this with the stacks of money next to images of the metals to really see how each metal stacks up against the others.
The results show that these are the ten most valuable metals:
- Californium
- Iridium
- Rhodium
- Rubidium
- Cesium
- Gold
- Platinum
- Palladium
- Rhenium
- Ruthenium
As we can see in the graphic, Californium is enormously valuable, much more so than any other metal on the list. The $765,436,299 per ounce price is staggering. What makes it so valuable and expensive? Californium is very difficult to produce. It has to be formed in a nuclear reactor and only two facilities in the entire world have the capability of doing what’s required to make Californium. Because Californium is man-made, we would consider it a synthetic alloy. Alloys are formed out of two elements whereas metals are found on the periodic table of elements.
The most valuable non-synthetic is iridium. Iridium is valuable because it’s useful but very difficult to mine. It’s found on asteroids that are often buried deep under the Earth’s crust, making it difficult to extract. Many of these metals attain their value because they’re necessary to building material for the aerospace, electronics, and automobile industries.
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