Ruthenium

Ruthenium is an unusual element in that it has been discovered twice! In 1807, Polish chemist Jedrzej Andrei Sniadecki analyzed platinum ores from South America, hoping to find a new element (the same way that William Hyde Wollaston and Smithson Tennant, who’d discovered rhodium, palladium, osmium, and iridium, had done). Sniadecki succeeded in discovering a new element in May 1808, but French chemists criticized his results, which they couldn't replicate. As a result, Sniadecki retracted his claim.

In 1827, Swedish chemist Jöns Jacob Berzelius and German chemist Gottfried Osann evaluated platinum samples from the Ural Mountains in Russia. Osann claimed to have found three new metals in the samples, which he called pluranium, polinium, and ruthenium. But Berzelius was skeptical of Osann’s claims.

It wasn’t until 1844 that Russian chemist Karl Claus definitively discovered ruthenium in the platinum samples (although nobody ever found Osann’s pluranium or polinium). Claus decided to keep the name for the element that Osann had chosen, which comes from the Latin word for Russia.

Ruthenium is a hard, shiny, silvery-white metal that looks like platinum. Ruthenium is one of the rarest elements on Earth!

About half of ruthenium is consumed by the electrical industry, where it’s used for electrical contacts, in chip resistors, and in electrodes. Another 40% of ruthenium is used by the chemical industry, especially as a catalyst (which helps make chemical reactions happen). Ruthenium can also be alloyed with platinum to make the platinum harder, or it can be alloyed with other metals to improve their durability and corrosion resistance.

Ruthenium(III) chloride is among the most common commercially available forms of ruthenium. Ruthenium bonds readily with carbon. Some ruthenium compounds have recently been used in solar panels to convert the sun’s energy into electricity.

In nature, you’ll find ruthenium in several stable, or non-radioactive, isotopes—seven of them, to be precise: ruthenium-96, ruthenium-98, ruthenium-99, ruthenium-100, ruthenium-101, ruthenium-102, and ruthenium-104.

Scientists have discovered 27 radioactive isotopes, with half-lives ranging from around one year to less than a second.

Ruthenium is part of the platinum group of metals. As a result, it’s usually found in ores alongside other platinum group metal elements—like osmium, iridium, and, you guessed it, platinum.

Most ruthenium is produced as a byproduct of nickel processing. The biggest ruthenium producers are South Africa, Russia, and Zimbabwe.