I bet it would still be less valuable than regular gold even after that. It could still be identified, and people would discriminate against it. People are funny about nuclear waste, and likely wouldn't accept arguments like "it's perfectly safe" and "it's less radioactive than a banana".
Then they could sell pure gold, and then hold the crap gold for 20 years and sell that later.
BTW, I was at Teardown.
I also doubt it would be worth much less. I suspect most gold physically sits idle for longer periods of time while changing ownership often.
But I think it may actually end up in jewelry especially as it can be mixed with “natural” gold to reduce its signature even further.
So now we just need to figure out how to make mercury-198 cheaply.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_mercury
Since mercury forms vapor so easily, it should be easily enriched in gas centrifuges like uranium (more easily, actually, since the starting isotopic abundance is higher and the chemistry is simpler). The high price of purified mercury-198 at present is probably due to it being a scientific curiosity with no industrial demand.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...
https://www.marathonfusion.com/alchemy.pdf
> Since the process described here permanently transmutes mercury into a valuable material, it is possible that fusion transmutation could be considered as a form of waste disposal. While early plants will be highly incentivized to specifically transmute 198Hg, we note that the isotopes with higher neutron number can also in the long term be transmuted to 197Au...
>The EU also has 6000 tons of mercury currently and expects to need to dispose of 11,000 tons over the next 40 years [95, 96]. As such, even with no change in existing processes, 14,000 metric tons of mercury could be made available for processing and isotope removal in the next ten years of fusion development, corresponding to 1400 tons of 198Hg and about the same mass of 197Au, with a current market value of ∼ $140B.
We just have to figure out how to nudge Mercury into the Sun… cheaply.
Something isn't adding up
https://thebsdetector.substack.com/p/government-funded-alche...
The authors have institutional credibility, as well as a lot of ARPA-E and private funding. Additionally, their approach mostly builds on prior work in a manner that suggests the proposed mechanism is quite plausible, although at an extremely low TRL as you can imagine.
The economics do seem to check out, provided that (1) fusion energy achieves an economic net positive, (2) the engineering considerations required for this approach don't make the design of the whole plant implausible due to the narrow windows for tritium sustainability anyway, and (3) there aren't some fundamental physics issues that arise making the whole pathway impractical (such as simulations for the (n,2n) cross-section for mercury being too optimistic).
The Washington monument capstone is aluminum because aluminum was expensive in 1884. Now we make beverage containers out of aluminum. (note: I have no intention of using gold for beverage containers... I like my skin not blue)
I thought gold was biologically inert. Any chance you’re thinking of argyria, which is caused by exposure to elemental silver?
Or at least I hope so as I've got a gold (plated?) AeroPress metal filter which works great although I've not noticed any metallic taste from other metal filters.
Isn't that problem just with silver, not gold?
Hmmm, mercury-198 is 10%[1] of mercury, of which in 2022, China was the top supplier at 2000 tonnes[2], so 200 tonnes of that is the "good stuff". Not a lot of easy access to open data on Mercury spot prices, this source[3] has it at $2000 per flask which is 76 lbs or 34.5 kg. Using our 10% number that's 7.6lbs per flask. Which if you convert that into 7.6lbs of gold you can sell it for a bit over $300K. So not too bad. Presumably a lot of currently shut down mercury mines might start up again, but you're adding 9 tonnes of mercury 'waste' to get your 1 ton of Hg-198. The cost of disposing that might be challenging. If you could sell it back at the current spot price for mercury by flask it would be great, but with all the extra supply I think the price might go down? Which kind of helps your economics until someone only puts mercury on the market that they have already removed the HG-198 from. Being vertically integrated with your own mercury mines and reserves would be good here.
The thing I don't get is why fusion? I mean you can get fast neutrons out of fission too, what sort of gamma flux do you need to generate Hg-197? Can the LHC do this trick? I mean seriously can you put a beaker of mercury in the beam path and transmute 3% of it to gold? Seems like a way to get budget for more experiments right?
[1] https://chemlin.org/isotope/mercury-198
[2] https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/mercury-p...
According to the paper, you need neutrons of at least 9 MeV to drive the transmutation. Fission reactions don't generate neutrons with energies that high. A proton accelerator can generate high energy neutrons by spallation, but in smaller numbers. It wouldn't be economically viable to do this with accelerator generated neutrons.
The paper shows that neutrons from deuterium-tritium fusion are energetic enough (14.1 MeV) to drive the transmutation reaction, and they're a natural byproduct of a D-T fusion reactor, and adding this extra gold generating step shouldn't compromise the ordinary fuel breeding and power generating operations of a commercial fusion reactor.
So now all they need is a commercial fusion reactor. I say that with tongue firmly in cheek, but also impressed that working fusion reactors (if they ever arrive) can also upend the current gold market.
> power plants can generate five thousand kilograms of gold per year, per gigawatt of electricity generation
A GW-year is 8760 GWh. That's 8760/5000 = 1.75 GWh per kg of gold. At 0.15 USD/kWh, a GWh costs $150k US. So 1.75GWh costs about $263k. A kg of gold costs about 100k US.
Another thought is that gold is a useful product, so anything that reduces the price of gold is good for the industries that use it. Are there other rare elements that are more useful, though?
The advice is generally not to advertise yourself as having been a PhD candidate: you're basically advertising that you couldn't complete a PhD. (Insert obligatory caveats about academia having problems, and failure to complete a PhD not implying that somebody is incapable.)
I think if you got three years into a PhD and were faced with the prospect of starting it all over again in another lab, it wouldn't take much to convince you to throw in the towel and do something else instead.
Are they alleging they are currently synthesizing gold? Seems like they are saying, if you do X, Y, and Z with a fusion reactor at some time in the future, you will also get gold as a byproduct.
Honestly in my case I discovered I like being paid actual money and despise academic politics. Got a job offer so I phoned in sick on a catch up with my adviser and never went back. No one even checked on me for 6 weeks (!)
Also—I appreciate the alchemical aspects. A nice aesthetic for a future vision.
This can just scale, if the price of gold is factored into the economics of the process, then the price of gold would bottom out at the price of this process.
Besides I was hoping mining asteroids funded by gold, avoiding busting the market would encourage space industry.
The point is that there is absolutely no stable element that cannot be synthesized using the neutron output of a fusion reactor.
Abstract A scalable approach for chrysopoeia—the transmutation of base metals into gold—has been pursued for millennia. While there have been small-scale demon- strations in particle accelerators and proposals involving thermal neutron capture, no economically attractive approach has yet been identified. We show a new scalable method to synthesize stable gold (197Au) from the abundant mer- cury isotope 198Hg using (n, 2n) reactions in a specialized neutron multiplier layer of a fusion blanket. Reactions are driven by fast 14 MeV neutrons provided by a deuterium-tritium fusion plasma, which are uniquely capable of enabling the desired reaction pathway at scale. Crucially, the scheme identified here does not negatively impact electricity production, and is also compatible with the challenging tritium breeding requirements of fusion power plant design because (n, 2n) reactions of 198Hg drive both transmutation and neutron multiplication. Using neutronics simulations, we demonstrate a tokamak with a blanket configu- ration that can produce 197Au at a rate of about 2 t/GWth/yr. Implementation of this concept allows fusion power plants to double the revenue generated by the system, dramatically enhancing the economic viability of fusion energy.
>Using neutronics simulations, we demonstrate a tokamak with a blanket configuration that can produce 197Au at a rate of about 2 t/GWth/yr.
https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/newtons-recipe-for-alche...
>"Historians now know that this was a pseudonym invented by the Harvard-educated chemist George Starkey, one of the US’s first published scientists. Starkey moved to England in 1650,..."
"No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!"
This leaves us with certain cryptocurrencies.
