Nickel Facts
Nickel Facts
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| Interesting Nickel Facts: |
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| Pure nickel is rarely found on Earth. |
| Nickel's use by civilization's dates back to at least 3500 BC. |
| It was first discovered to be an element by Alex Fredrik Cronstedt in 1751. |
| Cronstedt originally thought he was working with copper when he discovered it. |
| Nickel is considered to be corrosion-resistant. |
| Roughly six percent of the world's nickel is used to nickel-plate objects to protect them from corrosion. |
| About sixty percent of the nickel mined today goes into alloy production, specifically nickel steels. |
| Nickel can be a skin allergen in some people, so iron replaced it in coins. |
| Some plants and microorganisms require amounts of nickel as a nutrient. |
| Along with iron, cobalt, and gadolinium, nickel is one of four elements that are magnetic at room temperature. |
| Above 355 degrees Celsius (the Curie temperature), nickel is no longer magnetic. |
| There are five stable isotopes of nickel. |
| Ni-58 is the most abundant of those isotopes, with more than 68% natural abundance. |
| There are eighteen known radioactive isotopes of nickel. |
| Ni-59 is the radioisotope that is most stable, with a half-life of around 76,000 years. |
| Many radioisotopes of nickel have half-lives of less than 30 seconds. |
| The half-life of Ni-78 has now been determined to be 110 milliseconds. |
| Nickel is especially useful in dating the age of meteorites. |
| Most of the Earth's nickel has been found to be in the outer and inner core of the planet. |
| The mid-eighteen hundreds saw nickel used for currency, originally with the Flying Eagle cent. |
| Switzerland and Canada have used coins that were nearly pure nickel. |
| Russia is the largest producer of nickel, mining about one-fifth of the market of the element. |
| Finland, Turkey, and Greece also have large nickel deposits. |
| Nickel can also be mined from large deposits on the ocean's floor. |
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