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Posted on 07/28/2025 4:40:49 PM PDT by Blood of Tyrants
A Silicon Valley startup claims it can turn mercury into gold.
San Francisco, California-based Marathon Fusion is proposing a process that uses nuclear fusion to turn mercury into gold — something that has been sought by people for thousands of years.
"Unlike previous attempts, our method is massively scalable, pragmatically achievable, and economically irresistible," Marathon Fusion said on its website.
"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."
In a Cornell University scientific paper submitted July 17, Marathon Fusion said it's possible to use high-energy neutrons from a fusion reactor to bombard mercury-198, turning it into mercury-197, which then decays into stable gold-197 over a matter of days.
(Excerpt) Read more at newsmax.com ...
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In nanogram amounts.
The amount of energy required to make economic quantities of gold would be enormous.
No one has yet made a fusion reactor that can produce even a few kilowatts of electric power as anything but short pulses, and that technology is still a long way away.
The capital cost of a 1GW nuclear plant is around $6B, in theory (the costs of meeting regulations and time uncertainties are almost incalculable).
The value of five tons of gold is around $106M, so the payback time for the $6B capital investment is close to 60 years. That’s just doing back-of-the-envelope calculations, and not counting overhead and operating costs, just capital.
Because more gold can always be mined - or in this case created - it isn’t fundamentally scarce. Buy bitcoin. ;-)
About 18 years to be safe to make sure all isotopes are gone
Almost identical, it seems.
Comparison
Mercury-200: Total binding energy ≈ 1571.89 MeV, B/A ≈ 7.86 MeV/nucleon
Gold-197: Total binding energy ≈ 1548.95 MeV, B/A ≈ 7.86 MeV/nucleon
The binding energy per nucleon for both Hg-200 and Au-197 is nearly identical at ~7.86 MeV/nucleon, indicating similar nuclear stability per nucleon. However, Hg-200 has a slightly higher total binding energy due to its larger number of nucleons (200 vs. 197).
About 25 ounces of gold per kilogram of gold, at 12 troy ounces per pound.
3K dollars per ounce = 75k dollars per kilogram of gold.
5K kilograms x 75K dollars =375 million dollars per year at 2.5 Gigawatthours per year.
The article says gold would be a byproduct, not a cost of operation.
All theoretical, of course
Gold is absolutely inert, mercury is extremely toxic to living organisms. I can’t imagine man being able to change those properties.
I think I remember seeing a gold Mercury pimpmobile along about East 105th Street in Cleveland back in the late 70s. Used to be some interesting businesses on Euclid on either side of the Cleveland Clinic.
Neutron budget.
You need a very high neutron flux to make this happen.
Which means a HEU reactor that needs to be recharged every 3 months.
Nothing new here.
I just understand the arguement economically. The power plant is a set costs, so it’s a relatively small thing to set up an extra process to create the gold from the mercury since you have the power plant already.
I smell something that reminds me of a feedlot.
The Rip Van Winkle Caper. Where gold is worthless
A troy ounce is very close to 31.1 grams, so there are about 32.15 troy ounces in a kilogram, not 25.
There it is!
But Superman used coal to make diamonds, not gold.
Now tell me how many nucleons are in a gram. Multiply that by 23 MeV per nucleons.
That’s the energy released when turning a gram of Mercury into gold.
Is this something which can be reasonably handled / dissipated by the reaction vessel?
(What is the conversion *rate* in nucleons / sec) ?
According to Grok, it would currently cost about $217,000/gram to convert mercury into gold. Not feasible, if you are intending to set up a power plant for this purpose because gold is worth only about $80/gram.
However, and I’m not advocating for this, it may not be as costly if you are doing it as an add-on to the existing power plant and using waste electricity to do this.
First you need a “fusion power plant” that hasn’t been invented yet.
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