I've been here and there interested in Chicxulub. Avi Loeb in 2021 floated the idea that it was a comet, which idea got shut down like most Loeb's ideas. Current thought is that iridium-laced rocks are C, like Chicxulub; forming close to home, then pulled further out, rarely returned to near-Earth. Now in addition to iridium they're talking ruthenium. Chicxulub has this, as do impactors of 3.5Gya so 1 Gy after our whole system formed. So let's talk about where it exists, and how to get at it.
Element 44 was discovered by an ethnic German scientist deep in "Ruthenia"... that is, in 1844 Россия. It was extracted from a platinum ore. As you can surmise, ruthenium is most uncommon down here. The impact record would indeed point to ruthenium being much more locally-common at mainsequence-plus-one-Gy, than today, or even 65 Mya. We just got unlucky this one scrap hadn't got far enough away. (Well... the dinos got so unlucky, and I suspect the marsupials. Platypodes could burrow out of it.)
I was pondering ruthenium as an asteroid-mining opportunity. But from 1 AU, C-types like Egeria tend to be a delta-V pest.
Looking it up, it seems that we can, instead, alchemate ruthenium at home; like we make antimatter at home. Physics does it for us - in practice, has already done this for us, in the form of beta-decay of Element 43, none of which isotopes are stable so none of it primordial anymore. We've made quite a bit more Technetium-99 as a waste product of nuclear reactions, 211 ky halflife, making this one of those more-annoying isotopes: too hot to use, too cold to store short-term. The beta-decay leads to stable ruthenium-99. One atom at a time. Ugggh.
... unless we were to paint Tc-99 (with its trace Ru-99) on the inner side of the reactor as a neutron sponge. Technetium-100 does the same beta, but faster. Ruthenium-100 is also stable.
I'd request some strong magnets to move those new electrons away from the computers and, also, maintenance personnel collecting the new ruthenium.
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