Nickel

Nickel is a hard, silvery-white transition metal that can be drawn into wire. Like iron, it can be strongly magnetic at room temperature. Its biggest use is in stainless steel, and it also forms alloys used in coins. Nickel compounds help store energy in many rechargeable batteries. In nature, nickel is found mainly combined with other elements in ores, including the sulfide mineral pentlandite and nickel-rich laterite deposits. Producers extract it by high-temperature processing or by dissolving it from ore in chemical solutions, then separating and refining it. Nickel also occurs naturally alloyed with iron in meteorites—a metal mixture that people used long before they learned to extract nickel from ores.