Marathon Fusion has announced a solution to the millennia-old grand challenge of alchemy: the transmutation of gold. Unlike previous attempts, our method is massively scalable, pragmatically achievable, and economically irresistible.
In deuterium-tritium fusion, high-energy neutrons drive "multiplication" reactions to close the fuel cycle by producing the tritium needed to sustain operation. Making use of those neutrons to drive a multiplication reaction on mercury-198, our approach produces mercury-197 which then decays in a few days to the only stable isotope of gold.
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.
This marks the beginning of a new Golden Age. Not only for the production of critical minerals, but also for energy, prosperity, and scientific discovery.
...read more at marathonfusion.com
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To put this in context - they are basically doing real-world bitcoin mining. Fusion tech has been on the horizon for some time, the limiting factor has been that capital cost to build plants far outweigh what electricity can be sold for commercially. (Note there are other much better funded competitors to marathon in the space, in fact marathon is fairly tiny)
However this this approach flips the script, since this gold yield represents basically a 2x to electricity cost (current rates)...so if fusion electricity production normally would require a 20 year payback, this would bring it down to 10 years (obviously price of gold going up would accelerate that)...at this level it may start to attract investment
There are few headwinds though:
So although an interesting approach, this isn't going flood the market with gold....
Wow cool. I consulted with AI. If every power plant in the world were producing 5k kgs of gold per year that would be 42 times the annual mined supply of gold.
This gold's got a problem, it's radioactive. They still gotta figure out a way to scrub it before it's good to go!
I consulted AI again. 18 years for it to cease to be radioactive. I am sure they will figure out a way to get that number down. It will be like aging wine. You aren't making gold for today you are making it for 20 years from now.
Still quite a breakthrough. Even if we are 20-30 years away from this being feasible and scalable that does still bring gold's long term store of value into question.
what a bullshit article
why?
From all POV is a total nonsense.
People are really dumb believing these crap articles that feed their greed.
I thought you were saying it was a scam to rip off investors, which it totally could be!
that will be the side effect
So build power plants for the gold revenue and give away the power, right?