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tedd's avatar

Without cheating, can you guess how much this Pt costs?

Asked by tedd (14088points) May 16th, 2011

I work at a glorified refinery that basically makes high purity metals that go into computer processors and stuff. I do analytical chemistry for quality control, basically we get small chunks of the various metals and chop them up and test them to make sure they’re as pure as they need to be. Well about a year ago while I was working here as a temp, the guy I ended up replacing full time was caught stealing various metals during the very early hours of the morning (he arrived earlier than most everyone else). Turns out he had been doing this for at least a few years and selling the metals to an out of state, no-questions-asked scrap yard. He’d even gone as far as claiming he had won a few hundred thousand dollars in the lottery a couple years back to account for his sudden nice car.

Most of what he got was a metal called Tantalum. He had hundreds of pounds of tantalum (runs about ~$80 per pound) in his car alone. Its not technically a precious metal, but its worth more than copper and is very rare (the only known mines are in Asia). He also got paladium, gold, silver, indium, titanium, chromium, manganese, and a bunch of others, including as per the question, platinum.

Today they finally brought back a huge box full of metal he took for us to sort out (no longer need it as evidence I guess). In this box there were several hundred “sample bags” that we use. They’re about 2 inches wide and maybe 6 inches high, and each contain a metal, with a label on the outside of the bag. I pulled one out at random, and it was a bag of platinum. I weighed it and took out the bag weight…. ~21 grams of platinum… Less than the amount of sugar in most cans of pop…. if you took a pencil, shaved off an inch or two, removed the graphite and broke it into little pieces in the palm of your hand, thats about the amount of platinum.

Without cheating, just guess how much that tiny amount of pure platinum is worth right now.

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11 Answers

WasCy's avatar

$741

Okay, it’s not exactly a guess, except as to the value of platinum per ounce. My guess is around $1200 per ounce. At 34 grams to the ounce, 21 grams is about ⅔ of an ounce.

Brian1946's avatar

I think gold is about $1,000/oz. and 21 grams is 0.75 oz.
I’m fairly sure that plat is more expensive than Au, so my guess is about $2K.

YoBob's avatar

So, we are talking just under an ounce. I’ll guess somewhere in the neighborhood of $2000.

MonstrousPeace's avatar

My guess is around $1800

lillycoyote's avatar

LOL. No molybdenum? That’s what I would steal just because it’s so much fun to say. Molybdenum; the word rolls right off your tongue.

flutherother's avatar

28 grams to the ounce, 21 grams is ¾ of an ounce. Doesn’t help too much. Platinum is worth more than gold so at a pretty wild guess, $10,000.

Stinley's avatar

I’m guessing a lot, otherwise you wouldn’t have posted. Put us out of our misery then!

tedd's avatar

lol…...... it cost exactly $1300 (per our calculations). Now imagine that that was one bag in a box of several hundred. Dude was robbing this place blind.

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