Fusion Startup Says It's Figured Out How to Turn Mercury Into Gold

A fusion energy startup claims to have found a way to turn mercury into gold.

As the Financial Times reports, San Francisco-based Marathon Fusion says that the same process that could one day represent a limitless source of clean energy could also be used for literal alchemy.

As detailed in a yet-to-be-peer-reviewed paper, nuclear transmutation — effectively changing an element or isotope into a different one by ripping out protons from its nucleus — could be used to synthesize gold particles.

"On paper it looks great and everyone so far that I talk to remains intrigued and excited," Department of Energy plasma physicist Ahmed Diallo, who reviewed the study, told the FT.

Over the last three years, Marathon Fusion has raised almost $6 million in investments and $4 million in government grants, focusing its efforts on making fusion power systems more efficient.

Yet the concept of replicating the conditions in the Sun's core to produce a net positive amount of energy has remained extremely elusive, despite decades of research. Scientists are only beginning to crack the point at which fusion plants generate more energy than they require to operate. Scaling up these operations is proving just as difficult, with scientists struggling to contain extremely high-energy and unpredictable plasma inside enormously complex reactors.

Earlier this year, Marathon turned its attention to nuclear transmutation, proposing to introduce a mercury isotope, mercury-198, into a fusion reactor to turn it into mercury-197. That's in addition to the conventional fuels used to realize fusion inside a reactor, such as lithium and hydrogen isotopes.

But this time, there's an interesting side effect: mercury-197 is an unstable isotope that eventually decays into gold-197.

While the process remains unproven, the startup's leadership is seeing dollar signs — or gold ingots, as the case may be. CTO Adam Rutkowski and CEO Kyle Schiller say they could produce 11,000 pounds of gold a year per gigawatt of electricity generation — and without affecting the overall power output of the system.

As a result, the hypothetical fusion power plant could theoretically double its revenue, they claim.

"The key insight here is that you can use this set of fast neutron reactions to make really large quantities of gold while satisfying the fuel cycle requirements of the system," Rutkowski told the FT.

Of course, it's not quite as simple as that. For one, other gold isotopes created in the process could make the valuable metal radioactive, which could mean it would have to be stored for anywhere from 14 to 18 years before it's safe to handle.

Even with a massive surge in new startups attracting billions of dollars in investments to turn fusion reactors into a viable form of energy production, the basic concept of fusing atoms to generate electricity has yet to become practical. As such, Rutkowski and Schiller's dream of getting rich from synthesizing gold is still little more than a glint in their eyes.

More on fusion: China's "Artificial Sun" Just Smashed the Record for Stable Fusion Reaction