Isaac Newton must be spinning in his grave.
"I knew mercury was involved. Just knew it!" https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/newtons-recipe-for-alche...
*Quicksilver
Marathon fusion claims to invent alchemy, making 5000 kgs gold per gigawatt
81–90 of 104 posts
Re: Marathon fusion claims to invent alchemy, making 5000 kgs gold per gigawatt
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
If it's that easy to separate from natural mercury then it seems like they could make a fortune just separating it and selling the separated mercury. Something isn't adding up
Maybe there is not a huge need for isotopically pure mercury so the current price is not reflective of acquisition/manufacturing costs?
Yeah, it’s expensive because nobody needs it so the process is very small scale and essentially a bespoke isotope separation service.
Re: Marathon fusion claims to invent alchemy, making 5000 kgs gold per gigawatt
#83It requires mercury-198 as an input. The only quote I could find for mercury-198 is about $15K per milligram. So now we just need to figure out how to make mercury-198 cheaply.
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 hi…
Seems like you are interested in section 5.2.4 of the paper:
https://www.marathonfusion.com/alchemy.pdf
> Since the process described here permanently transmutes mercury into a valuable material, it is possible that fusion transmutation could be considered as a form of waste disposal. While early plants will be highly incentivized to specifically transmute 198Hg, we note that the isotopes with higher neutron number can also in the long term be transmuted to 197Au...
>The EU also has 6000 tons of mercury currently and expects to need to dispose of 11,000 tons over the next 40 years [95, 96]. As such, even with no change in existing processes, 14,000 metric tons of mercury could be made available for processing and isotope removal in the next ten years of fusion development, corresponding to 1400 tons of 198Hg and about the same mass of 197Au, with a current market value of ∼ $140B.
Re: Marathon fusion claims to invent alchemy, making 5000 kgs gold per gigawatt
#84Actual 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 )
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.
Re: Marathon fusion claims to invent alchemy, making 5000 kgs gold per gigawatt
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
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 hi…
Seems like you are interested in section 5.2.4 of the paper: https://www.marathonfusion.com/alchemy.pdf > Since the process described here permanently transmutes mercury into a valuable material, it is possible that fusion transmutation could be considered as a form of waste disposal. While early plants will be highly incentivized to specifically transmute 198Hg, we note that the isotopes with higher neutron number c…
Yes, that section is fitting and interesting. It is the production-side view. I think I was more motivated by the comments envisioning an abundance of cheap gold, which seems not in any way near or even possible, even with this approach as cool and baffling as it is.
I don't think that it is of much use as waste disposal because again, it can only remove 10%, i.e., an insignificant amount. If it were even mined because of this, then more mercury waste would be produced than before, but increased mining would probably be many decades or centuries in the future, as long as there is still waste to reuse.
So, how long would the current midterm stockpile of 1400 t for 198Hg for the next 10 years last? At 5 t per 1 GW per year, i.e., 5 t per 8.76 TWh, and a current global electricity generation of ~30 PWh, replacing all energy production with fusion would be able to transmute 3400 t 198Hg per year, over twice the stockpile. Of course, there would be a myriad of other bottlenecks long before that, but consuming all the existing stockpile seems feasible in human time spans.
I am honestly impressed by the amount of transmutation that is possible with fusion. And it is a lucky coincidence that the half-life is only dozens of hours for the middle product. I never thought of that process or would have guessed grams of production instead of tons, probably because of the association with existing particle accelerators. It is quite amazing, but also presumably still decades off into the future.
Re: Marathon fusion claims to invent alchemy, making 5000 kgs gold per gigawatt
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
Seems like you are interested in section 5.2.4 of the paper: https://www.marathonfusion.com/alchemy.pdf > Since the process described here permanently transmutes mercury into a valuable material, it is possible that fusion transmutation could be considered as a form of waste disposal. While early plants will be highly incentivized to specifically transmute 198Hg, we note that the isotopes with higher neutron number c…
Yes, that section is fitting and interesting. It is the production-side view. I think I was more motivated by the comments envisioning an abundance of cheap gold, which seems not in any way near or even possible, even with this approach as cool and baffling as it is. I don't think that it is of much use as waste disposal because again, it can only remove 10%, i.e., an insignificant amount. If it were even mined becau…
This seems more like a way to help kick-start commercially viable fusion plants, rather than a way to mass produce gold.
Re: Marathon fusion claims to invent alchemy, making 5000 kgs gold per gigawatt
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
>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.
You guys have a lot more faith than I do in people's ability to have rational beliefs about nuclear waste.
Most people would never know, if it wouldn’t be for every gold-related company having a vested interest in making people scared of it.
Plus, 20 years is really not very long for it to be completely harmless; just ask the world’s supplies of whiskeys that really only start to have any value after 10+ years.
Re: Marathon fusion claims to invent alchemy, making 5000 kgs gold per gigawatt
#88[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...]
Re: Marathon fusion claims to invent alchemy, making 5000 kgs gold per gigawatt
#89Isaac Newton must be spinning in his grave.
"I knew mercury was involved. Just knew it!" https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/newtons-recipe-for-alche...
Good lord, chemistryworld.
>"Historians now know that this was a pseudonym invented by the Harvard-educated chemist George Starkey, one of the US’s first published scientists. Starkey moved to England in 1650,..."
Re: Marathon fusion claims to invent alchemy, making 5000 kgs gold per gigawatt
#90This blog post goes into considerable detail evaluating their preprint:
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).