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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).

>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.

That seems like so little time it’s just a slight detail to iron out.

I also doubt it would be worth much less. I suspect most gold physically sits idle for longer periods of time while changing ownership often.

17 years to banana is basically free money.

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.

The biggest problem is that it would prevent this type of gold from being useful in electronics and medical applications.

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.

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.

It reminded me of avocado trees. They take a couple of years to produce avocados and still people plant those.

Imagine a whiskey manufacturer saying "this is impossible because we'll have to age it for 13 years" lel

Well for gold that will be placed in some vault dig deep into the ground that doesn't seem too bad trade off..

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.

It's the second lightest natural isotope of mercury, comprising about 10% of natural mercury:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Isotopes_of_mercury

Since mercury forms vapor so easily, it should be easily enriched in gas centrifuges like uranium (more easily, actually, since the starting isotopic abundance is higher and the chemistry is simpler). The high price of purified mercury-198 at present is probably due to it being a scientific curiosity with no industrial demand.

That's even better! We can turn gold into mercury-198 and sell that. Gold is dirt cheap at $0.11 per mg. We're rich!

Even if you could separate mercury-198 for zero cost, it would only be 10% of the mercury production, and the yearly mercury production is 4500 t/yr, i.e., at most a maximum of 450 t/yr mercury-198. Compare this to gold production, which is 3100 t/yr, or silver production of 27000 t/yr. One might argue that mercury production could be ramped up if it is needed more, but its Earth's crust abundance is only slightly higher than silver, and again, mercury-198 would be 10x rarer than silver, i.e., only twice as abundant as gold.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Abundance_of_elements_in_Earth...

There are 7 stable isotopes of mercury, and mercury-198 makes up ~10% of naturally occurring mercury. The paper covers a lot of ground here, see section 5.2.2 "Mercury Isotope Separation", where they are shooting for $2.4/kg.

Are you kidding me? I heard there’s a whole entire planet of Mercury and it’s right next to the biggest fusion reactor in our solar system.

We just have to figure out how to nudge Mercury into the Sun… cheaply.

Ah, I was wondering why would anyone tell they can get 5 metric tonnes of gold (~$535M) for 2.5 GW of power (~$500). Regular mercury is ~$210/kg ($1.05m/5 tonnes or 500x cheaper than gold). Although, Hg198 has 10% natural abundance. So maybe they can use raw mercury and still get decent returns depending on what othere isotopes decay into.

It's 10% of natural mercury. you're looking into separating it cheaply instead, or at least hope the other naturally occuring isotopes don't cause too many problems.

> (note: I have no intention of using gold for beverage containers... I like my skin not blue)

I thought gold was biologically inert. Any chance you’re thinking of argyria, which is caused by exposure to elemental silver?

As others have posted, you're confusing gold with silver which can turn your skin blue (consuming lots of colloidal silver seems to be the main culprit).

Or at least I hope so as I've got a gold (plated?) AeroPress metal filter which works great although I've not noticed any metallic taste from other metal filters.

> I like my skin not blue

Isn't that problem just with silver, not gold?

I think you read that table a little quickly. Mercury-198 is 10% of natural mercury.

According to the paper, you need neutrons of at least 9 MeV to drive the transmutation. Fission reactions don't generate neutrons with energies that high. A proton accelerator can generate high energy neutrons by spallation, but in smaller numbers. It wouldn't be economically viable to do this with accelerator generated neutrons.

The paper shows that neutrons from deuterium-tritium fusion are energetic enough (14.1 MeV) to drive the transmutation reaction, and they're a natural byproduct of a D-T fusion reactor, and adding this extra gold generating step shouldn't compromise the ordinary fuel breeding and power generating operations of a commercial fusion reactor.

So now all they need is a commercial fusion reactor. I say that with tongue firmly in cheek, but also impressed that working fusion reactors (if they ever arrive) can also upend the current gold market.

Your source [1] is claiming 10.04% +/-0.003% for Mercury-198 abundance.

The gold is a byproduct of generating the electricity. You still get to sell the electricity too.

This is such a fun topic to think about, it's nearly science-fiction. The problem with fusion plants is that they don't exist except as small experimental reactors. I think this could be retrofitted to existing fission plants, pumping mercury 198 gas around the outside of the core (in heat-resistant pipes of course). Still an expensive proposition as you'd want to certify that it's not going to affect the safety and reaction rates of the reactor.

Another thought is that gold is a useful product, so anything that reduces the price of gold is good for the industries that use it. Are there other rare elements that are more useful, though?

15 cents per kWh is much more expensive than what you buy electricity for around the world. Also, they can time their usage for when the electricity is free or very cheap

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.

"Didn't" is not the same as "couldn't". Priorities change, and completing a PhD is a massive time commitment.

Well, he did pass his qualifiers so I guess that means something.

Given he left Princeton early and is now supposedly synthesizing gold merely two years later, the narrative seems in his favor.

As a former PhD candidate, yes that.

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 (!)

To update, yes, only Bitcoin and Litecoin remain. Monero has some tail emissions, although they safeguard the network, so it's still good.

The point is that there is absolutely no stable element that cannot be synthesized using the neutron output of a fusion reactor.

Rhodium and iridium can become very valuable, more than they are now, if they're relatively impractical to produce cheaply using fusion.

The first link on their site is alchemy.pdf behind announced a solution. Maybe read that? (40 pages) Or not, because here is the abstract ;)

Abstract A scalable approach for chrysopoeia—the transmutation of base metals into gold—has been pursued for millennia. While there have been small-scale demon- strations in particle accelerators and proposals involving thermal neutron capture, no economically attractive approach has yet been identified. We show a new scalable method to synthesize stable gold (197Au) from the abundant mer- cury isotope 198Hg using (n, 2n) reactions in a specialized neutron multiplier layer of a fusion blanket. Reactions are driven by fast 14 MeV neutrons provided by a deuterium-tritium fusion plasma, which are uniquely capable of enabling the desired reaction pathway at scale. Crucially, the scheme identified here does not negatively impact electricity production, and is also compatible with the challenging tritium breeding requirements of fusion power plant design because (n, 2n) reactions of 198Hg drive both transmutation and neutron multiplication. Using neutronics simulations, we demonstrate a tokamak with a blanket configu- ration that can produce 197Au at a rate of about 2 t/GWth/yr. Implementation of this concept allows fusion power plants to double the revenue generated by the system, dramatically enhancing the economic viability of fusion energy.

From the paper:

>Using neutronics simulations, we demonstrate a tokamak with a blanket configuration that can produce 197Au at a rate of about 2 t/GWth/yr.

"I knew mercury was involved. Just knew it!"

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/newtons-recipe-for-alche...

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.

This leaves us with certain cryptocurrencies.

Silver would be obly slightly more difficult to synthesize. Rhodium and iridium would be a lot more difficult.