Marathon Fusion says it can produce gold as fusion reactor byproduct
Tokamak fusion reactor turns mercury into gold
The dream of the ancient alchemists may come true as Marathon Fusion announces that its tokamak fusion reactor technology can turn common mercury into gold as a byproduct of fusion operations in quantities that would make Auric Goldfinger blush.
but five tonnes of gold out from mercury for every gigawatt (~2.5 GWth) of electricity generated.
They are gonna spend more time carting away gold than generating electricity. If this is real, and I have my uneducated doubts, why would they tell anyone about it? They will be wildly rich with such a proven gold generation source.
Not once they've produced enough gold to make it worthless.
Aluminum used to be one of the rarest, most-precious metals on earth. Now it's used as a disposable container.
If they kept it a secret, they could sell the gold continuously while the value slowly crashes, and still make a ton of money. But if you tell the world you can make gold for "free", the value craters overnight and you get nothing.
Jesus. Imagine if we could make gold cheap enough to make into soda cans. They wouldn't even need that plastic liner. A truly infinitely recycleable solution to packaging of all sorts. Imagine if the bag on the inside of cereal boxes was made from gold foil. What's so great about gold is it's incredibly chemically stable. That means it won't interact chemically with any food you package in it. And it's an element, not some forever chemical that will pollute our bodies and environment.
I want to see a world where all cheap disposable packaging is made out of gold.
Easier to get investors to just throw money at you than to actually make the product.
The units are weird, and the person writing the article seems to have conflated a few different quantities.
From the actual press release linked in the article:
Using our approach, power plants can generate five thousand kilograms of gold per year, per gigawatt of electricity generation (~2.5 GWth), without any compromise to fuel self-sufficiency or power output.
So unless I've also missed something, what they actually mean is 5 tons per year assuming a continuous power output of 2.5GW, which is roughly 22TWh of energy generation.
Or in slightly more approachable units, approximately 0.23g/MWh.
GWth means 1GW of thermal energy, nothing to do with tons.
The paragraph of note from the preprint paper:
Under this simplification, there are ∼ 1.12 × 1028 fusion reactions per year in a 1 GWth fusion device. Assuming neutron multiplication is dominated by (n, 2n) reactions, in order to achieve a TBR = 1.2, at an absolute minimum 20% of all fusion reactions must have a corresponding (n, 2n) reaction in the blanket; as a less conservative value, it is known that simplified blanket configurations (2 m thick, no structure, natural Li) can achieve as high as TBR ∼ 1.85 [26], in which case at least 85% of fusion reactions must have a corresponding multiplication reaction. This range corresponds to 3.7 × 103–1.6 × 104 mol/yr, or for a product with a mass of 197 amu, 732 − 3114 kg/yr of material production.
The paper seems to report an upper bound of 3000 kg/GWth/yr.
There does seems to be some conflating of GWth (GW of thermal power) with GWe(GW of electrical power). Assuming an efficiency of ~60% would make the numbers line up and that seems in the ballpark of possible conversion efficiencies.
why would they tell anyone about it?
Because not everyone in the world is a goblin?
I wish I had your optimism. This is a for-profit company making a press release. They are goblins.
This article is based on a preprint paper that hasn't been peer reviewed yet.
Mercury vapor would be really bad to have in a fusion plasma. It would drastically increase energy loss and would make maintaining the plasma difficult.
1st problem is that the mercury will highly likely poison the fusion plasma. The blanket is already a hard engineering problem to have it work in a "regular fusion reactor". 2nd problem nobody has said anything about is that you get a mixture of radioactive isotopes out of (a supposedly working) a transmutation reactor. This adds to required enrichment processes: to get 100% mercury-198 (from 10%) and possibly a purification of the freshly radioactive gold.
I'd imagine radioactive gold is pretty much worthless. The Au-197 is metastable, and to my flaky understanding will emit gamma-rays, not to mention the other isotopes generated around Au-197.
It's the perpetual motion machine that laid the golden egg...
How radioactive will it be?
Pfft, you aren't asking the right question, the real question is:
"How much healing power is it enfused with?"
:D
Both 198Hg and 197Au are perfectly stable isotopes and so according to the paper not at all!
However, my layman's understanding is that the breeder is a form of neutron irradiation, and neutron irradiation of 197Au yields 198Au which is radioactive and produces ~0.411 MeV of radiation and has a half-life of 2.69 days before decaying back to 198Hg.
Compare that with 235U. In comparison 198Au has no decay chain, ~10x less energy than the highest emitters, a much shorter half life and beta- decay instead of alpha decay.
Coverting to something like sieverts gets real tricky, but the beta decay means it's not very penetrative, ~4mm in biological tissue, and the short half-life means it will quickly stabilize itself. Therefore as long as it's not predominantly 198Au it's probably fine.
I would guess (based on very little) that it wouldn't have much radiation at all. This is fusion, not fission
... but at what cost?
Mercury
still pricy
The price of gold
"Nothing but worthless gold!"
Yes, they can create gold with nuclear reactors. Many years ago when I first learned about this, I recall it being unstable (turned back into lead) and radioactive, though.
I assume they worked the bugs out ages ago.
Probably only in minuscule quantities. Otherwise I'd say hold the economy ransom and demand social program funding.
Gold is not worth anything. Humans assigned a value. It's all made up.
It's a better conductor than copper. Doesn't oxidize like copper. Could be very useful if I'm the far future it could replace copper.
It's actually a worse conductor than copper. It's just used for contacts because it's nearly as good of a conductor and it doesn't oxidize. If you want a better conductor than copper then you want silver which to my knowledge is the best conductor out of all the base elements.
Electronics. Prior to electronics, what you said may have been somewhat true. But now gold has a real purpose.
Gold does have a purpose, my point is that the value of gold, paper money, diamonds, caviar, etc. is assigned and not a real number.