Startup Claims Its Fusion Reactor Concept Can Turn Cheap Mercury Into Gold
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Humans sometimes run out of things to want.
I think gold could become a less coveted substance just in terms of value as a status symbol, but it could still benefit from being mass produced just due to its material properties. It's a good conductor, doesn't tarnish, is very malleable, etc.
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Well getting more energy out of a fusion reactor than you put in is the really hard part, if you’re just doing it to make gold I imagine it’s easier
maybe you could use an h-bomb to do it, those have been around since 1951
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This is a fusion reactor, I'll believe its making energy instead of consuming it when someone manages to get one to be net energy positive
Sure - they're claiming to do two very difficult things simultaneously (net positive fusion and transmute mercury to gold at scale) which makes me even more skeptical. It's like saying "Not only can pigs fly, but we've taught them to simultaneously do calculus."
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maybe you could use an h-bomb to do it, those have been around since 1951
Well that’d be fusing hydrogen, so an Au-bomb maybe. Or Hg-bomb?
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If it is possible to make small amounts of those elements on purpose as a byproduct, it can help to offset the costs of the reactor in some small way and help with isotopic/nuclear research in general. But that can be done in pretty much any fusion reactor design to some degree.
As for Alchemy of the future, If in a thousand years we can just built whatever materials we need (including potential ultra heavy stable elements) from raw subatomic particles we don't even need mining, just gather up some hydrogen/helium from space and transmute it into whatever you need. food, fuel, structures, etc.
we don't even need mining, just gather up some hydrogen/helium from space and transmute it into whatever you need. food, fuel, structures, etc.
Believe it or not, this can actually be done without fusion alchemy.
It's been explored in science fiction and I believe there are some actual theories and papers on the subject, but here's the quick version:
The sun contains all the same elements found on earth in remarkably similar proportions (The exception being that all of earth's hydrogen and helium were blown away long ago). But unlike earth, in the sun the heavy elements don't separate and sink down to the core, everything just mixes together in one big suspension. Magnetic fields in the sun constantly eject charged particles out as solar wind and while these particles are mostly hydrogen, they actually contain every element found in the solar system. And because the particles are charged, this wind could be harvested using magnetic fields, it could be redirected and focused into a stream of matter for collection.
And it's a lot of matter that could be collected this way...
The sun loses 130 billion tons of matter in solar wind every day. For comparison, Mars's moon Deimos masses about 1.5 trillion tons, so the sun loses a full Deimos worth of matter every 12 days. There would be more than enough of every element in that stream to satisfy humanity for the foreseeable future.And my apologies for the long reply, someone mentioned space and I couldn't help myself.
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This is stupid, but not for the reasons you would think.
The energy required to change lead into gold is bigger than their difference in price.
LoL, why else would they be publishing a paper on the process rather than buying an absolute ton of mercury and manufacturing gold like mad?
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Should change their name to Rumpelstiltskin Energy
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Last week, Marathon Fusion, a San Francisco-based energy startup, submitted a preprint detailing an action plan for synthesizing gold particles via nuclear transmutation—essentially the process of turning one element into another by tweaking its nucleus. The paper, which has yet to undergo peer review, argues that the proposed system would offer a new revenue stream from all the new gold being produced, in addition to other economic and technological benefits.
Why do we try to turn things into gold? The price of gold would collapse if we succeeded, so wouldn't it be completely pointless?
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Why do we try to turn things into gold? The price of gold would collapse if we succeeded, so wouldn't it be completely pointless?
But what about alchemy?
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Why do we try to turn things into gold? The price of gold would collapse if we succeeded, so wouldn't it be completely pointless?
If you have a monopoly on the process, then its the same as the DeBeers Diamond Cartel. You can keep the price up by limiting the sale and spending a ton of money on marketing.
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Why do we try to turn things into gold? The price of gold would collapse if we succeeded, so wouldn't it be completely pointless?
I dunno. I would be cool with it if we stopped mining for Gold with all the environmental problems and found a way to profitably clean up the mercury from past gold mining and places like Grassy Narrows with extensive mercury poisoning.
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I think gold could become a less coveted substance just in terms of value as a status symbol, but it could still benefit from being mass produced just due to its material properties. It's a good conductor, doesn't tarnish, is very malleable, etc.
Yes, it's also a bit of an equalizer in terms of electronics production, if it becomes cheaper. One of my pipe dreams for the future is that such happens and makes it a bit more decentralized.
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I dunno. I would be cool with it if we stopped mining for Gold with all the environmental problems and found a way to profitably clean up the mercury from past gold mining and places like Grassy Narrows with extensive mercury poisoning.
That would be great. But what I'm talking about is the collapse of the price of gold.
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Last week, Marathon Fusion, a San Francisco-based energy startup, submitted a preprint detailing an action plan for synthesizing gold particles via nuclear transmutation—essentially the process of turning one element into another by tweaking its nucleus. The paper, which has yet to undergo peer review, argues that the proposed system would offer a new revenue stream from all the new gold being produced, in addition to other economic and technological benefits.
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That would be great. But what I'm talking about is the collapse of the price of gold.
Since fiat currencies are not connected to gold... no problem?
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I dunno. I would be cool with it if we stopped mining for Gold with all the environmental problems and found a way to profitably clean up the mercury from past gold mining and places like Grassy Narrows with extensive mercury poisoning.
I would assume that this would lead to a rise in mercury mining instead of cleaning up Mercury contaminations, because that would probably be cheaper. And I don't think mercury mining is any less toxic than gold mining.
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Why do we try to turn things into gold? The price of gold would collapse if we succeeded, so wouldn't it be completely pointless?
Who gives a shit about the gold price except for some idiots who think it has some inherent value beyond some applications in electronics.
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we don't even need mining, just gather up some hydrogen/helium from space and transmute it into whatever you need. food, fuel, structures, etc.
Believe it or not, this can actually be done without fusion alchemy.
It's been explored in science fiction and I believe there are some actual theories and papers on the subject, but here's the quick version:
The sun contains all the same elements found on earth in remarkably similar proportions (The exception being that all of earth's hydrogen and helium were blown away long ago). But unlike earth, in the sun the heavy elements don't separate and sink down to the core, everything just mixes together in one big suspension. Magnetic fields in the sun constantly eject charged particles out as solar wind and while these particles are mostly hydrogen, they actually contain every element found in the solar system. And because the particles are charged, this wind could be harvested using magnetic fields, it could be redirected and focused into a stream of matter for collection.
And it's a lot of matter that could be collected this way...
The sun loses 130 billion tons of matter in solar wind every day. For comparison, Mars's moon Deimos masses about 1.5 trillion tons, so the sun loses a full Deimos worth of matter every 12 days. There would be more than enough of every element in that stream to satisfy humanity for the foreseeable future.And my apologies for the long reply, someone mentioned space and I couldn't help myself.
The sun loses 130 billion tons of matter in solar wind every day.
But how much can be caught?
From the sun, the angular diameter of the earth (12,756 km wide, 149,000,000 km away) is something like 0.004905 degrees (or 0.294 arc minutes or 17.66 arc seconds).
Imagining a circle the size of earth, at the distance of the earth, catching all of the solar wind, we're still looking at something that is about 127.8 x 10^6 square kilometers. A sphere the size of the Earth's average distance to the sun would be about 279.0 x 10^15 square km in total surface area. So oversimplifying with an assumption that the solar wind is uniformly distributed, an earth-sized solar wind catcher would only get about 4.58 x 10^−10 of the solar wind.
Taking your 130 billion tons number, that means this earth-sized solar wind catcher could catch about 59.5 tons per day of matter, almost all of which is hydrogen and helium, and where the heavier elements still tend to be lower on the periodic table. Even if we could theoretically use all of it, would that truly be enough to meet humanity's mining needs?
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This is stupid, but not for the reasons you would think.
The energy required to change lead into gold is bigger than their difference in price.
But this reactor turns mercury into gold, and is meant to produce power.
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But this reactor turns mercury into gold, and is meant to produce power.
Mhhh. Would have to check the binding energy per nucleon charts. Might work. I automatically read lead.
