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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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[–] 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.