this post was submitted on 26 Jul 2025
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[Article] Marathon Fusion says it can produce gold as fusion reactor byproduct (newatlas.com)
submitted 1 week ago by BrikoX@lemmy.zip to c/interestingshare@lemmy.zip
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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.

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[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 19 points 1 week ago (4 children)

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.

[–] chiliedogg@lemmy.world 23 points 1 week ago (3 children)

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.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 7 points 1 week ago

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.

[–] WoodScientist@sh.itjust.works 6 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 6 points 1 week ago

Being an element doesnt exclude it from poisoning/pollution. Lead is an element and it'll happily poison people. Quick google suggests gold will kill at dosages 2g/kg, so probably dont want to ingest too much.

Gold isnt very strong on its own, so in order to use it for foil food packaging, it would require being attached to something else, which brings back the plastics part :(

[–] Zachariah@lemmy.world 22 points 1 week ago (2 children)

Easier to get investors to just throw money at you than to actually make the product.

[–] protist@mander.xyz 6 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago) (1 children)

I don't know why you got downvoted, this is genuinely the most likely reason. If they had proven this technology, they could fund themselves. Right now they just have a hypothesis

[–] saltesc@lemmy.world 1 points 1 week ago* (last edited 1 week ago)

Because Lemmy has that single person that downvotes everything. They probably think it's their "cool thing" and we're all wondering who it is and are always talking about them, but no one notices. It's just normal to see a single downvote when there's many upvotes.

[–] CameronDev@programming.dev 3 points 1 week ago

Thats exactly my point, fleece the investors, and it doesnt matter if the tech works or not.

[–] qupada@fedia.io 12 points 1 week ago (1 children)

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.

[–] SinAdjetivos@lemmy.world 2 points 1 week ago

GW~th~ 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/GW~th~/yr.

There does seems to be some conflating of GW~th~ (GW of thermal power) with GW~e~(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.