Last week, Marathon Fusion, a San Francisco-based energy startup, submitted a preprint detailing an action plan for synthesizing gold particles via nuclear transmutation—essentially the process of turning one element into another by tweaking its nucleus. The paper, which has yet to undergo peer review, argues that the proposed system would offer a new revenue stream from all the new gold being produced, in addition to other economic and technological benefits.
“But it’s worth noting that the same process would likely result in the production of unstable and potentially radioactive isotopes of gold. As such, Rutkowski admitted, the gold would have to be stored for 14 to 18 years before it could be labeled radiation-safe.”
Ah yes, 18-year vintage, very nice choice. Pairs well with a 3 carat lab grown diamond!
It’s only irradiated gold if it comes from the Radioactive Startup Part of San Fransisco.
Otherwise, it’s just sparkling rock.
No, my friend. Gold is an incredibly useful material, often not used because of price, unlike diamonds, which are mostly useful for abrasion/cutting.
If we had the technology to freely form diamond, then it’s exceptionally hard, has incredible chemical resistance, among the very best thermal conductivities of any material, and it isn’t particularly heavy.
Being able to coat the inside of chemical vessels and pipes with diamond would hugely increase their lifespan, a heat exchanger made out of it would be incredible. Great for food processing, since you’d be able to clean it easily; great for abrasive or highly acid / alkili materials that corrode everything else. Probably awesome as a base layer for semi-conductors, as it would be great for heat dissipation.
But we are probably talking about nanotechnology to lay it down in sheets, which we don’t have (yet).
Cheap gold could have a good effect on analog electronics, including the hobbyist kind.
I’m sometimes thinking that not everything needs a computer. If it does, many things are fine with a MC.
And not just analog electronics honestly, hobbyist computing in the ancient sense, of making hobbyist computers and using them, might have a small rebirth.
And mass-produced electronics would too become a fair bit cheaper to produce if gold were more widely available. Longevity, reliability. Maybe touchscreens’ economical advantage over physical buttons would be reduced even.
This is like a reverse Goldfinger plan. Could have an interesting impact on the gold market if it can be done at scale.
I’m sure most gold mining operations take at least a few years to get permitted and started and then there’s risk that you won’t find as much gold as expected.
Compared to a lump of gold that all you have to do is not lose it and it will appreciate in value all on its own.
“All you have to do is find it.”
The value of gold is not just in its scarcity, properties, luster, purity, etc., but also in the effort it takes to find or mine it. So, sure. Trip over a nugget and you’re…golden.
The same concept can be loosely applied to the abstraction of crypto currency. It takes energy and computational effort to acquire if you don’t just buy it.
Could have an interesting impact on the gold market if it can be done at scale.
Before figuring that out, they just need to develop a functioning fusion reactor. And since fusion energy is, as it has always been, a mere ten years off, it’s probable that such reactors will take longer to be developed than it will take that radioactive gold to be safe to handle.
Well getting more energy out of a fusion reactor than you put in is the really hard part, if you’re just doing it to make gold I imagine it’s easier
maybe you could use an h-bomb to do it, those have been around since 1951
Well that’d be fusing hydrogen, so an Au-bomb maybe. Or Hg-bomb?
I was wondering how radioactive the resulting material would be. Twenty years is totally viable for a power plant. Reactors in the US have been storing nuclear waste on site for a lot longer than that.
Just sell politicians the 14-year vintage, they love that.
any particle accelerator can do that just incredibly slowly.
Alchemy of that sort has been doable for generations, it’s just WILDLY impractical!
Currently many orders of magnitude more expensive than just buying an equivalent amount of gold, but makes me wonder what the future might be capable of with those proofs of concept.
Science circling back around to alchemy is an interesting thought.
If it is possible to make small amounts of those elements on purpose as a byproduct, it can help to offset the costs of the reactor in some small way and help with isotopic/nuclear research in general. But that can be done in pretty much any fusion reactor design to some degree.
As for Alchemy of the future, If in a thousand years we can just built whatever materials we need (including potential ultra heavy stable elements) from raw subatomic particles we don’t even need mining, just gather up some hydrogen/helium from space and transmute it into whatever you need. food, fuel, structures, etc.
just gather up some hydrogen/helium from space and transmute it into whatever you need. food, fuel, structures, etc.
Tea, earl gray, hot.
And a gross of self-sealing stem bolts.
we don’t even need mining, just gather up some hydrogen/helium from space and transmute it into whatever you need. food, fuel, structures, etc.
Believe it or not, this can actually be done without fusion alchemy.
It’s been explored in science fiction and I believe there are some actual theories and papers on the subject, but here’s the quick version:
The sun contains all the same elements found on earth in remarkably similar proportions (The exception being that all of earth’s hydrogen and helium were blown away long ago). But unlike earth, in the sun the heavy elements don’t separate and sink down to the core, everything just mixes together in one big suspension. Magnetic fields in the sun constantly eject charged particles out as solar wind and while these particles are mostly hydrogen, they actually contain every element found in the solar system. And because the particles are charged, this wind could be harvested using magnetic fields, it could be redirected and focused into a stream of matter for collection.
And it’s a lot of matter that could be collected this way… The sun loses 130 billion tons of matter in solar wind every day. For comparison, Mars’s moon Deimos masses about 1.5 trillion tons, so the sun loses a full Deimos worth of matter every 12 days. There would be more than enough of every element in that stream to satisfy humanity for the foreseeable future.
And my apologies for the long reply, someone mentioned space and I couldn’t help myself. 🤓
The sun loses 130 billion tons of matter in solar wind every day.
But how much can be caught?
From the sun, the angular diameter of the earth (12,756 km wide, 149,000,000 km away) is something like 0.004905 degrees (or 0.294 arc minutes or 17.66 arc seconds).
Imagining a circle the size of earth, at the distance of the earth, catching all of the solar wind, we’re still looking at something that is about 127.8 x 10^6 square kilometers. A sphere the size of the Earth’s average distance to the sun would be about 279.0 x 10^15 square km in total surface area. So oversimplifying with an assumption that the solar wind is uniformly distributed, an earth-sized solar wind catcher would only get about 4.58 x 10^−10 of the solar wind.
Taking your 130 billion tons number, that means this earth-sized solar wind catcher could catch about 59.5 tons per day of matter, almost all of which is hydrogen and helium, and where the heavier elements still tend to be lower on the periodic table. Even if we could theoretically use all of it, would that truly be enough to meet humanity’s mining needs?
Humans sometimes run out of things to want.
I think gold could become a less coveted substance just in terms of value as a status symbol, but it could still benefit from being mass produced just due to its material properties. It’s a good conductor, doesn’t tarnish, is very malleable, etc.
Yes, it’s also a bit of an equalizer in terms of electronics production, if it becomes cheaper. One of my pipe dreams for the future is that such happens and makes it a bit more decentralized.
I admit, it wasn’t on my 2025 bingo card, either.
This is stupid, but not for the reasons you would think.
The energy required to change lead into gold is bigger than their difference in price.
LoL, why else would they be publishing a paper on the process rather than buying an absolute ton of mercury and manufacturing gold like mad?
But this reactor turns mercury into gold, and is meant to produce power.
Mhhh. Would have to check the binding energy per nucleon charts. Might work. I automatically read lead.
Good to see Gargamel following his dreams.
Alchemy you say? Take my money now, I’ll ask questions later. Glad we got in on this before the peer review!
Kings dont fund science, Kings fund alchemy!
USA USA USA …
I’ll wait and see if they can add some AI to it. But if they can, I’ll invest my entire life savings.
Should change their name to Rumpelstiltskin Energy
So do it. Crash the economy, rip that bandaid right off.
In theory but can they do it efficiently. Probably not. And definitely not yet. But hey let them get the fool’s money.
I read up on this the other day and their claims are 8 tons produced per gigawatt of energy consumed. Even if they manage a quarter. Of that, it’s enough to obliterate the value of gold. I doubt this will actuary go anywhere either way but it would be nice to see.
This article says (5 tonnes/yr) per GW produced. It’s a fusion reactor, so it’s making electricity, not consuming it.
At $0.05/kWh, 1 GWh of electricity is $438 million. At $3400/troy ounce, 5 tonnes of gold is $545 million. So that jives with the company’s estimate on the article that the sale of gold could double their revenue.
All bunk, of course
This is a fusion reactor, I’ll believe its making energy instead of consuming it when someone manages to get one to be net energy positive
Sure - they’re claiming to do two very difficult things simultaneously (net positive fusion and transmute mercury to gold at scale) which makes me even more skeptical. It’s like saying “Not only can pigs fly, but we’ve taught them to simultaneously do calculus.”
That’s an enormous amount!
Most of the value of gold these days is its use in electronics, and jewelery. I’m fine with it being made cheap and plentiful. Anyone holding gold (or gold-backed investments) as opposition to other types of investments is going to see a big loss, but that’s what they bought into.
The search for the philosophers stone never ended.
I really think I’m close, I just need to distill a little more urine
If we can actually do nuclear transmutation, that’s like one step away from a Star Trek replicator
6.4L of air produces 1 cm3 of iron. I guess that’s not that bad. It’s like three people filling their lungs with air.
Why do we try to turn things into gold? The price of gold would collapse if we succeeded, so wouldn’t it be completely pointless?
I dunno. I would be cool with it if we stopped mining for Gold with all the environmental problems and found a way to profitably clean up the mercury from past gold mining and places like Grassy Narrows with extensive mercury poisoning.
I would assume that this would lead to a rise in mercury mining instead of cleaning up Mercury contaminations, because that would probably be cheaper. And I don’t think mercury mining is any less toxic than gold mining.
That would be great. But what I’m talking about is the collapse of the price of gold.
Since fiat currencies are not connected to gold… no problem?
Who gives a shit about the gold price except for some idiots who think it has some inherent value beyond some applications in electronics.
If you have a monopoly on the process, then its the same as the DeBeers Diamond Cartel. You can keep the price up by limiting the sale and spending a ton of money on marketing.
But what about alchemy?
When they can do transparent aluminum, I’m in!
edit: yes I know there’s a ceramic material called ALON, which the manufacturer calls transparent aluminum because it contains aluminum oxynitride, but I don’t think that’s what Scotty meant. ALON is about 30-35% aluminum, same as the amount of lead in leaded crystal glass, which isn’t “transparent lead”.
Aluminium Oxide (Al2O3) can be crystal clear too, it’s just Sapphire, I have a chunk of it on my wrist right now, looks pretty clear to me, and almost as hard as a diamond.
Transparent aluminum was around in 2018 source
a lot longer than that.
Synthetic corundum, spinel and others have been around for over 120 years, and optically transparent uncoloured sapphire glass for over 80 years. They are just aluminium oxides.
ALON is just the new hotness, and not as good as some others in terms of visible light transparency.
How do I invest?!?!?!
