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Look up "zirconium" in a web search engine or on eBay and you'll find thousands upon thousands of references, every single one of them to cubic zirconium jewelry. CZ as it's known is zirconium oxide, a hard, clear, diamond-like crystal that can be cut and polished to look a whole lot like a real diamond. Personally, I don't find that real diamonds look much, if any, better than CZ, and the notion of spending $10,000 for a diamond the same size as a $1 cubic zirconium strikes me as a bit nutty. For that kind of money you should at least get some color.
I suspect that once large gem-quality diamonds are routinely being synthesized (just a few years from now by the look of it) diamond may finally start to loose its position as the king of gems. That position was just made up by DeBeers anyway, and it's a fragile one given diamond's inherent boringness as a gemstone.
Back to zirconium, the metallic form is of course nothing like its oxide. As a metal zirconium is very corrosion resistant and is used in chemical processing equipment. But its most important use is as a cladding for nuclear fuel rods, because it has a very low neutron capture cross section (i.e. it's relatively transparent to neutrons). Since neutrons are what make a fission reactor run, it's important for the cladding not to absorb them.
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Small lump 99.6%.
Kindly donated by David Franco, who sent many elements after seeing the slashdot discussion.
Source: David Franco
Contributor: David Franco
Acquired: 17 May, 2002
Price: Donated
Size: 0.2"
Purity: 99.6%
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   Gem cut Zirconium oxide (cubic).
These beautiful 10mm brilliant cut CZ were purchased from http://www.pehnec.com in April 2002. Everyone who sees them agrees they are spectacular, especially when you consider the same size diamond would cost 10,000 times more and not look much better, if any.
Source: Pehnec Gems
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 17 April, 2002
Price: $60/50 stones
Size: 0.39"
Purity: 74%
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Slice of Historical Sample.
We are very honored to have received a slice cut from one of the first batches of pure zirconium metal ever to have been isolated. Randall Fullman donated this sample, and has this story about it:
"My grandfather, Martin Farlee, was an engineer who worked on the process to refine this metal at the US Bureau of Mines, Albany Research Center. Due to the flammable nature of the metal and the need for high purity for the nuclear industry, the process developed involved refining it in a vacuum using induction heating. I wished I could have gotten photos of the crucibles and induction equipment. In the same chamber in which it was refined, it was poured to make ingots for the tests. This sample is from these tests."
"As an industrial metal, it is not traded as a precious metal such as gold, silver, platinum, etc. However about 30 years ago it was more valuable than platinum. "
"The metal properties that are of interest are its high strength, and the fact that it is transparent to radiation. The main use for the metal is in fuel rods in nuclear reactors. It holds the fuel pellets while not interfering with the reaction by absorbing radiation."
"Due to the use of the metal in the nuclear industries, the refining process came under the gun of the nuclear regulatory commission. Even though the metal is not radioactive, it is refined from sand from Australia. A survey of the tailings of the sand found a background radiation level very much like the level found in most red bricks used in buildings. As such it was declared low level radioactive waste, just the same as many old government buildings. This has created much grief for Wah Chang (a major refiner of zirconium), just as it has for many demolition companies trying to dispose of old bricks."
On the subject of why he's willing to send us a piece of this sample, Randall reports:
"Due to the shape of the sample, and the fact I had used it to pound nails in a pinch, taking a small slab off the bottom is not a problem. As promised, I got a sample cut for you after I found someone with a saw with liquid cooling."
Analysis by x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy at the Center for Microanalysis of Materials, University of Illinois (partially supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under grant DEFG02-91-ER45439) showed no contamination within the detection limits of the machine, at worst about 100ppm. Zirconium usually occurs together with hafnium and the two are very hard to separate, so for this sample to have no hafnium whatsoever is remarkable, and indicates that they worked really hard to purify it. This in turn indicates that it was intended for nuclear applications where such purity is a necessity.
Source: Randall Fullman
Contributor: Randall Fullman
Acquired: 26 June, 2002
Price: Donated
Size: 3"
Purity: >99.99%
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Fake Emerald.
This is a fake (cubic zirconium based) emerald from http://www.pehnec.com. We once thought the color was from yttrium, but now I doubt that, so it's been moved under zirconium because that's the one thing I do believe about it.
Source: Pehnec Gems
Contributor: Ed Pegg Jr
Acquired: 15 July, 2002
Price: $10
Size: 0.4"
Purity: 74%
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Tiny cylinder.
Ed bought half a dozen different tiny metal cylinders from David Franco, intending to make some kind of puzzle out of them (Ed's a puzzle person). But they turned out to be too irregular, so he donated them to the table.
Source: David Franco
Contributor: Ed Pegg Jr
Acquired: 19 August, 2002
Price: Donated
Size: 0.2"
Purity: 99.6%
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Old photographic flash bulb.
Back in the dark ages, cameras used one-time-only flash bulbs that ignited a fine wire inside a glass bulb. Some or all of them used zirconium for the wire, presumably because it burned with a particularly good light. There's a bulb similar to this one under rhenium too, because it contains an igniter wire made of that metal. I don't know if this one uses a rhenium ignitor or not, but it's clearly labelled as containing zirconium wire.
Reports Tryggvi:
The woolly stuff in GE flashbulbs is zirconium. (I.e. , the stuff that burns and makes the light. The bulbs are also filled with a few atmospheres of oxygen). The flashbulbs in the cubes that were used on some Kodak Instamatics were not triggered electrically (with rhenium wire), but with a percussive pyrotechnic mix inside a little metallic tube that stuck out of the bulb.
Source: eBay seller erinsplace2001@yahoo.com
Contributor: Theodore Gray
Acquired: 1 August, 2002
Price: $1
Size: 1.5"
Purity: >50%
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Tungsten/zirconium alloy screw plug.
Neil Lipson, the source of most of my tungsten and molybdenum, sent me this little plug in exchange for me analyzing what it's made of. He was hoping there might be iridium in it, but instead analysis by x-ray fluorescence spectroscopy at the Center for Microanalysis of Materials, University of Illinois (partially supported by the U.S. Department of Energy under grant DEFG02-91-ER45439) indicates that it's a strange mixture of primarily tungsten (62%) and zirconium (30%), with the remainder being iron and nickel.
I looked around on the web and could find no references to tungsten-zirconium alloy, but that's no proof that such a thing isn't used in specialized applications. I would guess high temperature, corrosive environments, perhaps a chemical reaction chamber that operates at high pressures and temperatures.
Source: Neil Lipson
Contributor: Neil Lipson
Acquired: 18 December, 2002
Price: Donated
Size: 0.75"
Purity: 30%
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Sample from the Everest Element Set.
Up until the early 1990's a company in Russia sold a periodic table collection with element samples. At some point their American distributor sold off the remaining stock to a man who is now selling them on eBay. The samples (excepted gasses) weight about 0.25 grams each, and the whole set comes in a very nice wooden box with a printed periodic table in the lid.
To learn more about the set you can visit my page about element collecting for a general description and information about how to buy one, or you can see photographs of all the samples from the set displayed on my website in a periodic table layout or with bigger pictures in numerical order.
Source: Rob Accurso
Contributor: Rob Accurso
Acquired: 7 February, 2003
Price: Donated
Size: 0.2"
Purity: >99%
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