Warning: This experiment produces small amounts of toxic ruthenium tetroxide gas.
Do this outside or in a fume hood.
Greetings fellow nerds.
So I noticed that ruthenium based jewellery is getting very popular these days.
It's a cool idea.
Ruthenium is a very interesting metal with a tremendous amount of interesting chemistry.
What's even cooler is that it's impervious to a lot of chemicals that would normally destroy other metals.
I actually have a whole video testing various acids against ruthenium.
And I show that it's even impervious to aqua regia which would destroy gold and platinum.
It's a wonderfully resilient metal.
So it would make sense to try and make some jewelry out of it.
Now not all ruthenium jewellery is pure ruthenium.
A lot of the jewellery I see is ruthenium plated or ruthenium alloyed.
This is because ruthenium itself is actually quite expensive and difficult to work with.
While it's not as expensive as gold, there is still very little pure ruthenium jewelry on the market.
Anyway, I made this video because there is something of great concern to me.
As you know, chemistry is a million way game of rock-paper-scissors.
What is strong against one chemical may be incredibly weak against something else.
Unfortunately this applies to ruthenium metal, and what's worse is that ruthenium is weak to something very common and very easy to accidentally encounter, bleach.
I showed this in my previous video on the chemical properties of ruthenium.
Ruthenium dissolves in bleach, and what's worse is that it produces toxic ruthenium compounds in doing so.
So I'm going to test the effects of sodium hypochlorite bleach on this ruthenium plated ring.
Maybe i'm wrong and nothing will happen or very little will happen.
So here is the bleach, common household bleach you'll find at the supermarket.
And I'm going to drop in the ring.
Let me zoom in for a better look.
And, oh crap it's actually reacting, and it's really quick too.
It's just been a minute and copious amounts of the ruthenium are coming off.
Now i should point out that this is a ruthenium plated ring and not pure ruthenium, so just the surface plating will react and most of the ring should remain.
But this is still a significant amount.
The chemical reaction that's happening is the sodium hypochlorite is reacting with the ruthenium to form sodium ruthenate and perruthenate.
Both of these are toxic heavy metal salts.
But what's even scarier is that a small amount will continue to react to produce toxic ruthenium tetroxide gas.
This is the more reactive cousin of osmium tetroxide, another toxic metal oxide gas.
I'll be honest I'm actually quite surprised and terrified that this reaction is this easy to access for the common person.
Ruthenium jewellery and bleach make a toxic metal salt that will get on your skin and also produce a toxic gas that you'll likely inhale.
Depositing finely divided ruthenium metal and ruthenium dioxide in your lungs is extremely bad.
Now I think ruthenium alloyed jewellery might be safer since the alloying buries more of the ruthenium atoms into the bulk metal.
Kind of like how chromium is buried in stainless steel.
But on the whole, knowing this reaction is possible, I still wouldn't buy ruthenium based jewellery for my non-existent girlfriend, plated, alloyed or otherwise.
Gold and platinum might dissolve in aqua regia and also produce toxic salts, but the chances of the average person accidentally encountering aqua regia is extremely low.
So gold and platinum are relatively safe.
Bleach on the other hand is very common and the chances of encountering that are high enough that I wouldn't want to risk anyone wearing ruthenium.
Interesting side note is that after I reacted away all the ruthenium there was a gold plated ring underneath.
The jeweler probably made a bunch of cheap gold plated rings and then electroplated ruthenium metal on top.
This is sometimes done because the base metal underneath the gold might accept gold plating, but not ruthenium plating.
So the gold is plated first, and ruthenium plated on top of the gold as gold accepts a much greater variety of metals.
In anycase, this emphases the safety of gold as it is impervious to common household bleach, unlike ruthenium.
So my official recommendation is probably to stay away from ruthenium jewellery if you can help it.
Thanks for watching.
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