ASTATINE

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Source: Does not occur in nature. Produced by bombarding bismuth with alpha particles.  See history.

Price Per Gram: Not for sale.  Check uses.  There is said to be only between 1 to 30 grams of Astatine available in the world at any one moment accourding to different sources.  See picture to better understand the amount on earth.

Uses: none; Astatine-211 (half-life 7.21 hr) may sometimes be used as a radioactive tracer; like iodine, it is thought to collect in the thyroid gland.  The chemical properties are very similar to iodine and all the other properties.

Extra Information: "Synthesized in 1940 by D.R. Corson, K.R. MacKenzie, and E. Segre at the University of California by bombarding bismuth with alpha particles. The longest-lived isotopes, with naturally occurring uranium and thorium isotopes, and traces of At-217 are equilibrium with U-233 and Np-239 resulting from interaction of thorium and uranium with naturally produced neutrons. The total amount of astatine present in the earth's crust, however, is less than 1 oz. Astatine can be produced by bombarding bismuth with energetic alpha particles to obtain the relatively long-lived At-209-211, which can be distilled from the target by heating in air. The "time of flight" mass spectrometer has been used to confirm that this highly radioactive halogen behaves chemically very much like other halogens, particularly iodine. Astatine is said to be more metallic than iodine, and, like iodine, it probably accumulates in the thyroid gland. Workers at the Brookhaven National Laboratory have recently used reactive scattering in crossed molecular beams to identify and measure elementary reactions involving astatine. (http://www.nidlink.com/~jfromm/elements/astatine.htm)"