Latest news with #transmutation
Telegraph
6 days ago
- Business
- Telegraph
Nuclear fusion start-up claims to have cracked alchemy
Over thousands of years, it has captivated thinkers such as Newton, the English physicist who developed the mathematical law of universal gravitation in the late 17th century. Many dreamed of creating a 'philosopher's stone' that would be used as a catalyst for transmuting base metals such as lead into gold. Marathon's idea relies on substituting materials used in the well-understood process of nuclear fusion instead. Fusion takes place when two isotopes of hydrogen, deuterium and tritium, are forced together to create helium, releasing high-energy subatomic particles called neutrons. It is accomplished by heating the deuterium and tritium atoms to extreme temperatures of more than 100 million degrees Celsius and then confining them into a tight space so that they collide. The process becomes self-sustaining when helium atoms collide with the fuel particles, transferring their energy and ensuring the reaction keeps going. But fusion reactors typically contain other materials, including isotopes of beryllium, lead, or lithium, to ensure there is continuously enough tritium in the mix. These are known as 'multipliers' because when they are hit by a neutron, they release two neutrons in their place. These extra neutrons then react with lithium to produce tritium. Radical transformation Marathon's method uses mercury-198, a common form of mercury, as a multiplier. When hit by a neutron, these atoms change into a less stable form called mercury-197. Over a few days, those atoms then naturally break down into a stable form of gold. Marathon claims this means the fusion process can be used to generate supplies of gold as a byproduct, 'without any compromise to fuel self-sufficiency or power output'. Using the new approach, the company says a fusion power plant with a capacity of about one gigawatt could generate 5,000 kilograms of gold per year. The gold produced by the reaction is stable, but could contain some radioactive gold isotopes, potentially meaning it must be stored for up to 18 years, according to the company. The start-up added: 'Marathon's techno-economic modelling suggests that fusion plants could create as much economic value from gold production as they do from electricity production, potentially doubling the value of these facilities, radically transforming the economics of fusion and of energy more broadly.' Beyond gold, it also claimed the transmutation process could be used for making precious metals such as palladium, synthesising medical isotopes, or producing materials for 'nuclear batteries'. Marathon was founded by Adam Rutkowski, a former engineer at Elon Musk's rocket company, SpaceX, and Kyle Schiller, who was a fellow at ex-Google boss Eric Schmidt
Times
12-05-2025
- Science
- Times
Alchemists rejoice as Cern turns lead into gold — for a flash
In a quiet coup for physics, scientists have achieved what generations of alchemists could only dream of: turning lead into gold. The feat was achieved not in a dark medieval laboratory, but inside the world's most powerful particle accelerator, the Large Hadron Collider (LHC). Operated by the European Organisation for Nuclear Research (Cern) and buried deep beneath the Franco-Swiss border, the LHC is perhaps the largest and most complex machine yet built. The transmutation, detailed in a paper published in Physical Review Journals, was a side-effect of a high-energy experiment in which two beams of lead atoms were smashed together at close to the speed of light. • Scientists split over successor to Large Hadron Collider As they screamed past each other, three protons were
Yahoo
10-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
Large Hadron Collider Physicists Turn Lead into Gold—For a Fraction of a Second
The dream of seventeenth-century alchemists has been realized by physicists at the Large Hadron Collider (LHC), who have turned lead into gold — albeit for only a fraction of a second and at tremendous cost. The not-so-mysterious transmutation happened at CERN, Europe's particle-physics laboratory, near Geneva, Switzerland, where the multi-billion-dollar LHC smashes together ions of lead for a portion of each experimental run. Early chemists hoped to turn abundant lead into precious gold. But differences in proton number between the elements (82 for lead and 79 for gold) made that impossible by chemical means. [Sign up for Today in Science, a free daily newsletter] CERN researchers achieved the feat by aiming beams of lead at each other, travelling at close to the speed of light. The ions occasionally glance past each other, rather than hit head on. When this happens, the intense electromagnetic field around an ion can create a pulse of energy that triggers an oncoming lead nucleus to eject three protons — turning it into gold. The LHC's ALICE experiment filtered out these instances of transmutation from the wider collision debris. In an analysis published on 7 May in Physical Review Journals, the team calculated that between 2015 and 2018, collisions at the LHC created 86 billion gold nuclei — around 29 trillionths of a gram. Most of the unstable, fast-moving gold atoms would have lasted around 1 microsecond before smashing into experimental apparatus or breaking into other particles. Gold is being made any time lead beams are collided at the LHC, but ALICE is the only experiment with the detector set up to spot this process. The analysis 'is the first to systematically detect and analyse the signature of gold production at the LHC experimentally', says Uliana Dmitrieva, a physicist and member of the ALICE collaboration. Another CERN accelerator called the SPS observed lead changing into gold from 2002 to 2004, says Jiangyong Jia, a physicist at Stony Brook University in New York. But the latest experiments are at higher energy, have a much higher probability of creating gold and make for much cleaner observations, he adds. CERN researchers have no plans to take up gold-making as a side hustle, but say that better understanding how photons can change nuclei will help them to improve the LHC's performance. 'Understanding such processes is crucial for controlling beam quality and stability,' says Jia. This article is reproduced with permission and was first published on May 9, 2025.
