The alchemist's dream is to make gold from common metals, but can this be done?
The physics needed to explain how to change one element into another is well
understood and has been used for decades in accelerators and colliders, which smash subatomic particles together.
The most notable present-day example is the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, based in Geneva. But the costs of making gold this way are vast, and the quantities generated are minuscule.
For example, Cern's Alice experiment estimated it produced only 29 picogrammes of gold while operating over four years. At that rate, it would take hundreds of times the lifetime of the universe to make a troy ounce of gold.
The Californian startup company Marathon Fusion has proposed a very different approach: to use the radioactivity from neutron particles in a nuclear fusion reactor to transform one form of mercury into another, called mercury-197.
This then decays into a stable form of gold: gold-197. This process of particle decay is where one subatomic particle spontaneously transforms into two or more lighter particles.
The team from Marathon Fusion estimates that a fusion power plant could produce several tonnes of gold per gigawatt of thermal power in a single year of operation.
Bombarding the isotope mercury-198 with neutrons leads to the creation of the
radioactive isotope mercury-197 – which subsequently decays to the only stable
isotope of gold.
The key is to have energetic enough neutrons to trigger the mercury decay sequence. If this could be made to work, then it is an interesting idea. But whether it could make a tidy profit is another matter.
To do this, a large neutron flux (a measure of the intensity of neutron radiation) is required. This can be generated using a standard fuel mix for fusion reactors, deuterium and tritium (both of which are forms of hydrogen), to create energy in the plasma of a fusion reactor.
Neutrons penetrate material easily and scatter off the nuclei (cores) in atoms, slowing down as they do so. Neutrons with energies above 6 million electron volts are required to transform mercury-198 into gold.
To come up with its estimates, Marathon Fusion has been using a fusion reactor's "digital twin" – a computer model that simulates the physics of the fusion reaction and the resulting radioactive processes. A limitation of this type of work is that the digital twin needs to be validated against a real commercial fusion reactor – but none currently exist.
www.sciencealert.com
The physics needed to explain how to change one element into another is well
understood and has been used for decades in accelerators and colliders, which smash subatomic particles together.
The most notable present-day example is the Large Hadron Collider at Cern, based in Geneva. But the costs of making gold this way are vast, and the quantities generated are minuscule.
For example, Cern's Alice experiment estimated it produced only 29 picogrammes of gold while operating over four years. At that rate, it would take hundreds of times the lifetime of the universe to make a troy ounce of gold.
The Californian startup company Marathon Fusion has proposed a very different approach: to use the radioactivity from neutron particles in a nuclear fusion reactor to transform one form of mercury into another, called mercury-197.
This then decays into a stable form of gold: gold-197. This process of particle decay is where one subatomic particle spontaneously transforms into two or more lighter particles.
The team from Marathon Fusion estimates that a fusion power plant could produce several tonnes of gold per gigawatt of thermal power in a single year of operation.
Bombarding the isotope mercury-198 with neutrons leads to the creation of the
radioactive isotope mercury-197 – which subsequently decays to the only stable
isotope of gold.
The key is to have energetic enough neutrons to trigger the mercury decay sequence. If this could be made to work, then it is an interesting idea. But whether it could make a tidy profit is another matter.
To do this, a large neutron flux (a measure of the intensity of neutron radiation) is required. This can be generated using a standard fuel mix for fusion reactors, deuterium and tritium (both of which are forms of hydrogen), to create energy in the plasma of a fusion reactor.
Neutrons penetrate material easily and scatter off the nuclei (cores) in atoms, slowing down as they do so. Neutrons with energies above 6 million electron volts are required to transform mercury-198 into gold.
To come up with its estimates, Marathon Fusion has been using a fusion reactor's "digital twin" – a computer model that simulates the physics of the fusion reaction and the resulting radioactive processes. A limitation of this type of work is that the digital twin needs to be validated against a real commercial fusion reactor – but none currently exist.
US Startup Claims It Can Make Gold Using Fusion Technology
The alchemist's dream is to make gold from common metals, but can this be done? The physics needed to explain how to change one element into another is well understood and has been used for decades in accelerators and colliders, which smash subatomic particles together.
www.sciencealert.com
