Palladium is also used in electronics, dentistry, medicine, hydrogen purification, chemical applications, groundwater treatment, and jewelry.

Palladium is a key component of fuel cells, in which hydrogen and oxygen react to produce electricity, heat, and water.

Palladium belongs to group 10 in the periodic table, but the configuration in the outermost electrons is in accordance with Hund's rule.

It may slowly develop a slight brownish coloration over time, likely due to the formation of a surface layer of its monoxide.

The discoverers suggest that the coalescence and differentiation of iron-cored small planets may have occurred 10 million years after a nucleosynthetic event.

As it is not very mobile in the environment and has a relatively low decay energy, 107Pd is usually considered to be among the less concerning of the long-lived fission products.

[33] Russia's company Norilsk Nickel ranks first among the largest palladium producers globally, accounting for 39% of the world's production.

[40] A complication for the recovery of palladium in spent fuel is the presence of 107Pd, a slightly radioactive long-lived fission product.

Depending on end use, the radioactivity contributed by the 107Pd might make the recovered palladium unusable without a costly step of isotope separation.

[41] Palladium is also used in jewelry, dentistry,[41][42] watch making, blood sugar test strips, aircraft spark plugs, surgical instruments, and electrical contacts.

For example: When dispersed on conductive materials, palladium is an excellent electrocatalyst for oxidation of primary alcohols in alkaline media.

[48] Palladium is also a versatile metal for homogeneous catalysis, used in combination with a broad variety of ligands for highly selective chemical transformations.

In 2010 the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded "for palladium-catalyzed cross couplings in organic synthesis" to Richard F. Heck, Ei-ichi Negishi and Akira Suzuki.

The electronic sector consumed 33 tonnes (1.07 million troy ounces) of palladium in 2006, according to a Johnson Matthey report.

[57] While this property is common to many transition metals, palladium has a uniquely high absorption capacity and does not lose its ductility until x approaches 1.

[58] This property has been investigated in designing an efficient and safe hydrogen fuel storage medium, though palladium itself is currently prohibitively expensive for this purpose.

[62] Palladium is used in small amounts (about 0.5%) in some alloys of dental amalgam to decrease corrosion and increase the metallic lustre of the final restoration.

[69] In early 2004, when gold and platinum prices rose steeply, China began fabricating volumes of palladium jewelry, consuming 37 tonnes in 2005.

[75] Mitochondria appear to have a key role in palladium toxicity via mitochondrial membrane potential collapse and depletion of the cellular glutathione (GSH) level.

High doses of palladium could be poisonous; tests on rodents suggest it may be carcinogenic, though until the recent research cited above, no clear evidence indicated that the element harms humans.

Between 4 and 108 ng/km of palladium particulate is released by such cars, while the total uptake from food is estimated to be less than 2 μg per person a day.

[77] William Hyde Wollaston noted the discovery of a new noble metal in July 1802 in his lab book and named it palladium in August of the same year.

[11] Wollaston purified a quantity of the material and offered it, without naming the discoverer, in a small shop in Soho in April 1803.

[83] Palladium chloride was at one time prescribed as a tuberculosis treatment at the rate of 0.065 g per day (approximately one milligram per kilogram of body weight).

In the run up to year 2000, the Russian supply of palladium to the global market was repeatedly delayed and disrupted; for political reasons, the export quota was not granted on time.

[88] Around that time, the Ford Motor Company, fearing that automobile production would be disrupted by a palladium shortage, stockpiled the metal.

[92] In January 2019 palladium futures climbed past $1,344 per ounce for the first time on record, mainly due to the strong demand from the automotive industry.

[95] Global palladium sales were 8.84 million troy ounces (275 t) in 2017,[96] of which 86% was used in the manufacturing of automotive catalytic converters, followed by industrial, jewelry, and investment usages.

The price for palladium reached an all-time high of $2,981.40 per ounce on May 3, 2021,[98][99] driven mainly on speculation of the catalytic converter demand from the automobile industry.

A later surplus of the metal was caused by the Russian government selling stockpiles from the Soviet era, at a rate of about 1.6 to 2 million troy ounces (50 to 62 t) a year.