I'm a bit worried that my trousers might fall down, that would be a first for Periodic Videos

I'm really excited. I've got here more than one and a half million pounds' worth of platinum group metals.

never had so many in front of me all at once

and we're here at Johnson Matthey Noble Metals and they've allowed us to see

all sorts of parts of the factory but just to warm up

as a sort of side show we have here five kilos of gold

and another five kilos in a packet.

These are each worth £150,000, so reasonable house just to get started.

We're here at a place where they're processing these metals here:

Rhodium, Iridium, Palladium and Platinum.

And the reason that they're called noble metals

is that they don't react with oxygen easily

In fact platinum is one that really even at high temperatures doesn't form oxides

the other ones can form oxides

Gold doesn't form oxides, gold is over here

and is close to these but is not normally considered a platinum group metal

Noble is an old-fashioned word meaning it doesn't react

a posh way of saying, "chemically boring."

The noble gases--they didn't think reacted with anything.

Now they know some of them do, but noble is

dismissing them as being worthy but boring

The important thing about the noble metals, the platinum group metals

is they're fantastic catalysts

they can be used for all sorts of applications,

making nitric acid, cleaning up car exhaust

and many other applications

So of course, in all this processing, they generate dust.

And most of it is caught, but some of it you can't avoid going into the air and falling to the floors .

So some of it collects on our shoes

So when you go in and out, they have special brushes

to clean the bottom of your shoes, and they recover really quite a large amount of metal

each year, worth more than a decent sized car

What they're doing in this factory

is taking this material, which is called sponge

which is what comes

from the mines. This is platinum sponge here

and in this bottle here is rhodium sponge

and it's much finer because rhodium is the last element to come out of the process

in the mines.

So they take this sponge

and turn it into grains, rather like this.

Here are grains of platinum

this is probably the only time in my life

that I will be able to play with platinum in such a casual way

and over here--I'll use the other hand so I don't mix them up--

are similar sorts of grains of iridium.

but they're very much heavier.

They turn this sponge

into those grains

by heating it up to high temperature

melting it, and then pouring the molten liquid out

and it's fantastic, you see this liquid that's so hot, it's bright red

and then it's cooled down rapidly to form the grains

and then the grains can be taken and melted

and cast into ingots

a large lump

and here we have an ingot of platinum

This weights 13 kilos

and you can see I can't lift it up with one hand

with two hands I can just about start lifting it

The difference between this and gold

is that you can use platinum as a catalyst

for all sorts of chemical processes

so ingots like this are then turned into bars like so

first of all by hammering the ingot very hard

with a heavy hammer when it's really hot

And the fantastic thing is at it hammers it, the metal gets hotter

the energy of the hammer is turned into heat

it starts glowing redder and redder

and then they take the hammered bar

and draw it down through a series of dies

so it first of all gets into a coil like this

and as the coil comes out of the die

it coils itself up. It's almost like magic,

you see this coming out and going round and round and round

I was mesmerized.

And then they take this heavier bar and put it through a series of dies

'til in some processes it gets narrower than my hair.

I didn't actually take out a hair to measure,

but I believe them.

And I couldn't see it, easily. The braider is much better with his lens and saw it.

Once they've got these fibers, these wires, they can then start making all sorts of materials.

They can knit the fibers together

or weave them, just like you do with cloth

to make fine meshes, which are used in the chemical industry

for catalyzing reactions.

Particularly, for example, turning ammonia into nitric acid

This process that we've all read about in books

ammonia going into nitric acid, but actually to see

these huge pieces of fiber woven together,

and what's so interesting is that they're so thin

You imagine, when you see a huge chemical plant,

that it's full of catalysts, whereas in fact the operating catalyst

is really quite thin, and the reaction takes place very fast

and you need the rest to warm it up and cool it down afterwards

It's important to stress that in the mines

for the platinum group metals, and the main mines are in South Africa

in Russia, some are in Zimbabwe, and some are in Canada

in all these places, the amount of platinum group metals in the rock

is very very small

to make an ounce of this sponge

you require somewhere between 10 and 40 tons of rock.

A huge amount. And the other thing, the processing is not instantaneous,

once you've got the rocks out, to get the platinum material,

takes about six weeks of processing, letting things settle, processing some more

and rhodium takes another fourteen weeks, so twenty weeks, nearly half a year

to get the rhodium once you've dug the rocks to this stage

but once it gets here, they can process things really quite quickly.

Some of the samples we saw when we arrived

are already being processed.

Had to get us another ingot of platinum, the one we saw has already gone into the factory.

94% platinum, 6% rhodium, and part of the reason for this is that rhodium is a much rarer element

and also that people have found platinum, with a bit of rhodium

gives particularly good...