Unfortunately gold generated in this way would be radioactive. They calculate they would have to store the gold for over 13 years to not require labeling as radioactive waste, or over 17 years to reach the level of radioactivity of a banana.
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".
>In practice, given that much of all gold is used to store value and is not actively in use, we do not expect the need to store it for 7–17 years to be a major impediment; at worst, it means that the product will initially have somewhat less value than pure 197Au, and so some discount should be applied to the value of freshly produced gold.
This is not a problem for finance bros, they would sell a discounted note that gave you "ownership" of the gold in 17 years at some discount on the current spot price of gold. So you'd get these things that 'mature' in 17 years and you know their going to be worth whatever the spot price of gold is then, so it becomes a simple problem of pricing the risk that gold will be worth something in 17 years (people by gold futures all the time which this basically is).
That thought fails altogether since it will do perfectly well sitting in a vault as a reserve for a 1:1 gold backed crypto coin. Of course this holds true only until its value collapses due to its lack of scarcity.
The "gold" would not be radioactive as far as I understand. The reaction is 198Hg (stable) -> 197Hg (65h half life) -> 197Au (stable). You would end up with a mix of radioactive 197Hg and stable 197Au. It should be easy to separate these with established processes because you can easily refine 99.99% gold via various chemical and electrolytic processes. But I doubt any established refinery would touch radioactive inputs because it would contaminate the whole processing chain.
I mean, as a species we dig up gold for the sole purpose of putting it into well protected vaults as a store of value. It's not a far cry to say we'll simply store the radioactive gold in lead vaults instead.
But yeah, if we can print rare earth metals now, I won't be betting on them to store economic value.
> previously a […] PhD candidate in Plasma Physics at Princeton University
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.)
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 (!)
During my research internship, I met many PhD students whose labs simply ran out of funding. In some cases, they'd ended up having to scrap their PhD as the topic was too specialist to do anywhere else (e.g. requires a high level of biocontainment) and nobody wanted to fund it.
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.
After some studying, there is absolutely no stable element cannot be synthesized using the neutron supply of a fusion reactor. Silver is relatively easy to synthesize from cadmium.
Even if this were true, at 0.15 USD/kWh it would cost more than just buying the gold. Even excluding cost of cleaning up the radioactivity, the equipment, labor, everything except the power.
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.
To be clear, this is something that would be wrapped around a fusion power plant (capturing neutrons produced by fusion), not a viable fusion plant itself nor a way to generate gold from just any power plant, right?
I dont trust a site that simultaneously says "we are performing a once in a century technical feat" and "we can only say great things about this like we are selling something and not mention potential pitfalls".
Actual industrial/product use of gold is less than 10%. A massive amount of gold is used for store of wealth. If gold became less scarce, it would be less expensive.
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)
EDIT Note: Sharp eyed commentators pointed out I misread the table, which makes the economics better. I had originally 3% but updated it to 10%
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?
If about 4 million KG of gold is normally produced a year, then this newly available gold will quickly drive down prices, leaving only Bitcoin as a store of value. Talk about unintended consequences…
[Waits for people to realize that breeding at scale with neutrons has been done since the early 1940s, and then to go on to wonder whether the AEC / DoE (& their contractors) ever found an 'alternate funding source' over the intervening decades...]
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).
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.
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[ 2.5 ms ] story [ 55.7 ms ] threadI 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".
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.
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.)
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 (!)
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.
This leaves us with certain cryptocurrencies.
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.
Also—I appreciate the alchemical aspects. A nice aesthetic for a future vision.
So now we just need to figure out how to make mercury-198 cheaply.
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)
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...
[3] https://www.metalary.com/mercury-price/
The point is that there is absolutely no stable element that cannot be synthesized using the neutron output of a fusion reactor.
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).
> power plants can generate five thousand kilograms of gold per year, per gigawatt of electricity generation
"No, Mr Bond, I expect you to die!"
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.