Aged Synthetic Rhodium

As The Pleiades Corporation began to take over more and more functions normally assigned to a political government in the 2060's and 2070's, it should not be a surprise that the company began to explore options for creating service medals, awards, and related items.  The Corporation, therefore, sought after a new material, something rare and difficult to obtain, but also highly decorative and reasonably well understood. The platinum group metals presented a set of excellent candidates, but even those rare metals were not quite rare enough.  The breakthrough realization was when a jeweler involved in the selection process who had a strong physics background realized that the platinum group metals are produced in small amounts by the fission of uranium.  The prospect of an already rare metal made even more rare through its mechanism of production was just the thing the selection committee needed.  Within a remarkably short time for such things, about a year, the committee settled on rhodium as it was one of the most decorative of the metals involved, and had a more reasonable storage requirement to reduce dangerous isotopes unavoidably produced during the synthesis process.  Rhodium also has the advantage that in the presence of certain fusion processes the decay of the most difficult isotope is dramatically enhanced, which made treatment in fusion power plants could be used to further improve the material, and this tied the result more fully to the crown jewels of The Corporation.  Once the material was selected, a process was developed to create the initial product, and then production and ageing facilities were created on Callisto.  By 2075 enough aged synthetic rhodium became available to begin producing corporate medals entirely, or plated, with the material.  From that time onward The Corporation used this material in every company award or recognition, with the amount included correlating directly to the quality of the award.  In the decades since then it has become a cultural assertion that the most desirable jewelry, including items as common as a wedding band, be at least plated with aged synthetic rhodium, and The Corporation, ever alert for a profit opportunity, now generates significantly more net income annually from the production of aged synthetic rhodium than was originally spent on the development program and initial facilities.  The price is maintained at an artificially high level to ensure company awards remain highly prestigious, but use by the general public still exceeds corporate use by a factor of eight.

What is Aged Synthetic Rhodium

Rhodium is a platinum group metal that is bright silver, and does not oxidize, or tarnish, under normal conditions.  All platinum group metals are a small fraction of the reaction products from fission of Uranium 235.  There is only one natural isotope of Rhodium, but Rhodium produced from fission has a small percentage of synthetic unstable isotopes.  The half-life of these isotopes is reasonably short, so by ageing the material in a properly shielded container in close proximity to a lithium fusion process for a few months, and then in cold storage for  a decade or two, the amount of unstable isotopes is reduced to an acceptable level.  Thus the material is produced by taking synthetic Rhodium, ageing it to reduce dangerous isotopes, and then conducting some minor filtering to ensure a clean and stable final product.

Type

Metal