Silicon Valley startup says it has found way to turn mercury into gold, if proven may hit gold prices

India Today

2 days ago

A fusion energy startup claims to have found a way to turn mercury into gold. According to the Financial Times report, San Francisco-based Marathon Fusion says that the same process that could one day represent a limitless source of clean energy could also be used for literal alchemy. As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, nuclear transmutation, effectively changing an element or isotope into a different one by ripping out protons from its nucleus, could be used to synthesise gold particles. "On paper, it looks great and everyone so far that I talk to remains intrigued and excited," Department of Energy plasma physicist Ahmed Diallo, who reviewed the study, told the Financial Times.advertisementOver the last three years, Marathon Fusion has raised almost $6 million in investments and $4 million in government grants, focusing its efforts on making fusion power systems more efficient.Yet the concept of replicating the conditions in the Sun's core to produce a net positive amount of energy has remained extremely elusive, despite decades of research. Scientists are only beginning to crack the point at which fusion plants generate more energy than they require to operate. Scaling up these operations is proving just as difficult, with scientists struggling to contain extremely high-energy and unpredictable plasma inside enormously complex reactors.
Earlier this year, Marathon turned its attention to nuclear transmutation, proposing to introduce a mercury isotope, mercury-198, into a fusion reactor to turn it into mercury-197. That's in addition to the conventional fuels used to realise fusion inside a reactor, such as lithium and hydrogen isotopes.But this time, there's an interesting side effect: mercury-197 is an unstable isotope that eventually decays into gold-197.While the process remains unproven, the startup's leadership is seeing dollar signs — or gold ingots, as the case may be. CTO Adam Rutkowski and CEO Kyle Schiller say they could produce 11,000 pounds of gold a year per gigawatt of electricity generation, and without affecting the overall power output of the system.Marathon claims its breakthrough technique could allow fusion reactors to produce gold as a bonus byproduct, without reducing the plant's energy output or compromising its ability to sustain its own fuel cycle. According to the company's projections, a fusion power station with a capacity of one gigawatt could generate around 5,000 kilograms of gold every year using this approach.The firm notes that while the gold created through this transmutation process would be stable, trace amounts of radioactive isotopes could still be present. This might mean the gold would need to be stored securely for as long as 18 years before it could be handled or sold safely.Marathon's techno-economic modelling suggests that such a setup could make gold production just as valuable as the electricity the plant generates, effectively doubling the commercial potential of a fusion facility and dramatically reshaping the economic case for fusion energy.advertisementBeyond gold, the company adds that the same nuclear processes could also be used to create other high-value materials, such as components for 'nuclear batteries,' medical isotopes for healthcare, and precious metals like palladium.As a result, the hypothetical fusion power plant could theoretically double its revenue, they claim.CTO also suggested that the key insight here is that it can be used in a set of fast neutron reactions to make really large quantities of gold while satisfying the fuel cycle requirements of the system. Of course, it's not quite as simple as that. For one, other gold isotopes created in the process could make the valuable metal radioactive, which could mean it would have to be stored for anywhere from 14 to 18 years before it's safe to handle.Even with a massive surge in new startups attracting billions of dollars in investments to turn fusion reactors into a viable form of energy production, the basic concept of fusing atoms to generate electricity has yet to become practical.- EndsTrending Reel