A start-up company in San Francisco, USA, announced that it can use nuclear fusion to turn mercury into gold. According to an academic paper published by Marathon Fusion, it is proposed to use the neutrons released by the nuclear fusion reaction to produce gold through the nuclear transmutation process. The company estimates that a fusion power station using this technology can produce 5,000 kilograms of gold for every 1,000 megawatts of electricity generated, a value equivalent to its power generation revenue.
Although the paper has not yet been peer-reviewed, it has received positive responses from some experts in the field.
Dr. Ahmed Diallo, a plasma physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's Princeton National Laboratory, said the solution "looks great in theory," and experts he communicated with were excited about it.
Marathon Fusion's technical solution is based on existing fusion reaction principles. Traditional fusion experiments use tokamak devices to heat two hydrogen isotopes, deuterium and tritium, to extremely high temperatures so that they fuse to produce helium and a large amount of energy released in the form of neutrons.
The company proposed introducing the mercury-198 isotope into the "breeder envelope" of the fusion power plant and converting it into mercury-197 using high-energy neutrons. Mercury-197 is an unstable isotope that decays into gold-197, the only stable isotope of gold, in about 64 hours.
The main challenge with this technology is that the presence of other mercury isotopes can produce unstable gold isotopes, causing the gold produced to be partially radioactive. Rutkowski estimates the gold would need to be stored for 14 to 18 years before it could be labeled completely safe.
Although physicists have previously synthesized gold using particle accelerators, the yields were extremely small and costly. Earlier this year, scientists at the European Center for Nuclear Research (Cern) observed lead atoms transforming into gold in high-speed, close-range collisions at the Large Hadron Collider.
This technological breakthrough may bring new revenue sources to the nuclear fusion industry and help accelerate the commercialization of fusion.
According to the latest industry research, global fusion companies raised US$2.6 billion in the 12 months to July, with total investment reaching US$9.8 billion.