[karen]

Doing a junior high project on scandium. Can't find answers to the flammability and soluabilityof scandium. Guessing not soluable since its a metal? Not flammable since melting and boiling point so high?

[jdurg]

Hi there.  If you click on the periodic table link here, you should be able to get some basic information about Scandium and a picture of what it looks like.  Scandium will VERY slowly react with water, and over a good period of time it will 'dissolve away' in water and turn into a bunch of scandium ions.  However this process is fairly slow.  (And requires the scandium to be finely divided and/or heated a great deal).  Scandium reacts with oxygen pretty readily to form scandium oxide (Sc₂O₃).  It will burn in air if heated enough.  If it wasn't so darned expensive I'd try and ignite a piece of what I have, but with the cost of it so high it would be like burning gold.   However its flammability is nothing like that of the alkali metals (lithium, sodium, potassium, rubidium, and cesium), magnesium, zirconium, uranium, or some of the heaver Group II elements.