Beginning in 2003, the substance that bears the “lunar” name of selenium (from the Greek selene, or Moon) exhibited an unprecedented growth in price, from US$8/kg in January, 2003, to US$80/kg in January, 2005, for material of 99.5% technical quality. Against the background of a quiet market for many other metals, this was so unexpected that in July, 2003, reviewers wrote that the “Sun has set on selenium,“ thus playing up the “cosmic” paradoxical nature of what had happened.
Of course, such an “astronomical” change in prices had to affect the other material closely associated with selenium both in origin and with respect to technology of extraction, i.e., tellurium (from tellurius, Earth). It is true that this happened later, starting from the middle of 2004 when the prices for Те began to grow just as precipitously and continued to increase until the end of 2005 [1, 2, 5—7].
