Would the character for it involve the radicals for "metal", "sun", and
"source"? The few references to it I've seen all use only katakana.

Would such a character have an "archaic" reading of something like ひもとがね in
the fashion that 鉄 has the archaic reading of くろがね?
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kanji
How would "nihonium" be written in Japanese Kanji?
All elements that do not have their own native Japanese word, such as oxygen
or iron, etc., are just transliterated from the English name (mostly). So
nihonium would just be ニホニウム. This is especially the case for the superheavy
synthetic elements since they have all been discovered recently and thus would
not have their own dedicated word in Japanese.
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Unlike Chinese, modern foreign words are rarely transliterated into kanji.
Because Nihonium is not a Japanese word in origin (though Nihon is indeed
Japan, adding the suffix of -ium makes it a foreign word), and therefore
written in katakana. There are some words, as you point out, like 鉄 that have
alternate readings, and words for elements which were used prior to an
awareness of the periodic table of elements, or the modern practice of
transliterating ALL foreign words to katakana, and ARE written in kanji.
だから日本語はおもしろい！
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There won't be new kanji for the elements in Japanese.

For Chinese, however, there's a call on naming (and writing) the new elements
[by the China National Committee for Terms in Sciences and
Technologies](http://www.cnctst.cn/xwdt/zhxw/201611/t20161117_354742.html).

From the Babelfish:

> ( 1) According to the principle of creating new words as little as possible,
> Make the word, try to use the existing ancient word.  
>  ( 2 ) selection or new Chinese characters should be in line with national
> norms.  
>  ( 3 ) to meet the shape of the characters as the main character writing
> features to reflect the nature of the element, pronunciation close to the
> international naming. ( 4 ) to avoid the same name with the previous
> elements, to avoid the use of polyphonic. ( 5 ) the use of simplified
> characters, to avoid using weird words, use less strokes of the word.  
>  ( 6 ) In order to avoid ambiguity, word selection should try to avoid the
> life of common words and has been used as other industry-specific Chinese
> characters.  
>  ( 7 ) as far as possible the use of simple and uncompromising words, in
> order to facilitate the cross-strait and the Chinese circle of scientific
> and technical terms of unity.

Taiwan may or may not find their own names and characters.
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I think if they did have a word for nihonium, it be 日本イウム, as 日本 is Japan and
イウム is ium. But this is just what I think personally.
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Chinese continues to create Kanji for newly discovered elements. You should
refer to the Chinese character for any new element if you want to write it
using Kanji. For Nihonium the Chinese character has been set as 鉨 (pinyin:
nǐ).
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