A prototype of a
plasma centrifuge.
Marathon Fusion has raised about $4mn
in US
government grants for
its plasma
centrifuge.
San Francisco
start-up says
modified fusion
process
could be used to
produce
gold from
mercury...
A
fusion energy start-up claims to
have solved the millennia-old challenge of how to turn other metals
into gold.
Chrysopoeia, commonly known
as alchemy, has been pursued by civilizations as far back
as ancient Egypt.
Now San Francisco-based
Marathon Fusion, a start-up
focused on using nuclear fusion to generate power, has said the
same process could be used to produce gold from mercury.
The paper has not yet been peer-reviewed but has had a positive
reception from some experts in the field.
"On paper it looks great and everyone so far
that I talk to remains intrigued and excited," Dr Ahmed
Diallo, a plasma physicist at the US Department of Energy's
national laboratory at Princeton who has read the study, told
the Financial Times.
Marathon was founded in 2023 by chief
executive Kyle Schiller and chief technology officer Adam
Rutkowski, both 30, as an engineering company aiming to solve
some of the technical challenges of building fusion power plants.
The start-up, which has 12 full-time employees, has raised $5.9mn in
investment and about $4mn in US government grants to date.
Initially the team worked on challenges such as
how to make the fuel burning system in a fusion power plant more
efficient and started thinking about the possibilities of
nuclear transmutation earlier this year, Rutkowski said.
Scientists have synthesized gold using particle accelerators but the
amounts have been tiny and the costs extremely high.
Earlier this year physicists at Europe's Cern
said they had observed lead atoms transforming into gold during
high-speed near-collisions inside the
Large Hadron Collider.
The most common experimental approach to fusion uses a device called
a
tokamak to heat two hydrogen
isotopes - usually
deuterium and
tritium - to extreme temperatures
so that they fuse to create
helium and vast amounts of energy
in the form of neutrons.
Most plans for potential fusion power plants aim
to combine some of the neutrons with lithium isotopes in a "breeding
blanket" to create more tritium for future reactions.
Diagram showing
how isotopes of
elements differ
because of the
number of neutrons
in their
respective nuclei.
Graphic by Ian Bott
Marathon's proposal is to also introduce a
mercury isotope, mercury-198, into the breeding blanket and use the
high-energy neutrons to turn it into mercury-197.
Mercury-197 is an
unstable isotope that then decays
over about 64 hours into gold-197, the only stable isotope of the
metal.
Rutkowski and Schiller say this means future fusion power plants
that adopt this approach would be able to produce 5,000kg of gold a
year, per gigawatt of electricity generation, without reducing the
power output or tritium-breeding capacity of the system.
At current prices, they estimate that amount of
gold would be worth roughly the same as the electricity being
generated, potentially doubling the revenue of the plant.
"The key insight here is that you can use
this set of fast neutron reactions to make really large
quantities of gold while satisfying the fuel cycle requirements
of the system," said Rutkowski, who previously worked at SpaceX.
A diagram explaining
a new process
by which gold
can be created from mercury
within a nuclear
fusion reactor.
Graphic by Ian Bott
One complication is that the presence of other
types of mercury is likely to result in the production of
unstable gold isotopes alongside
gold-197, meaning,
the metal could be partially
radioactive...
Rutkowski estimates this could mean the
gold has to be stored for 14 to 18 years for it to be labeled
"completely safe"...
The process could also be used to make other precious metals, but
Marathon predicts that the size of the gold market means
production from fusion reactions could be absorbed without hurting
prices.
Currently about 3,500tn of gold is mined every
year.
"Gold is in that sweet spot," said Dan
Brunner, a former chief technology officer at
Bill Gates-backed
Commonwealth Fusion Systems,
who is now a scientific adviser to Marathon.
"From a purely scientific perspective, it
looks like it all hangs together.
I think the challenge comes into actually
engineering it into a practical system."
Physicists first successfully fused atoms in the
1930s but no one has yet managed to produce more energy from a
fusion experiment than the process consumes.
Some scientists argue that
fusion power plants remain
decades away, however increased private investment in recent years
has brought optimism.
Commonwealth, for example, aims to turn on a
demonstration power plant in 2027 and supply electricity to Google
in the early 2030s.
In the 12 months to July fusion companies raised $2.6bn, bringing
total investment to date across 53 companies worldwide to $9.8bn,
according to the most recent study by the
Fusion Industry Association,
published on Tuesday.
Malcolm Handley, whose venture capital fund
Strong Atomics was Marathon's
first investor, said the possibility of generating gold revenues
from fusion power generation would unlock more funds for
Marathon and other companies to
accelerate their work.
Fusion companies had,
"signed up for a lot of hard problems", he
said. "The money this will unlock will make all of those
problems easier."
Marathon Fusion has
announced a solution to the millennia-old grand challenge of
alchemy:
the transmutation of gold...
Unlike
previous attempts, our method is massively scalable,
pragmatically achievable, and economically irresistible.
In deuterium-tritium fusion, high-energy neutrons drive
"multiplication" reactions to close the fuel cycle by producing
the tritium needed to sustain operation.
Making use of those neutrons to drive a
multiplication reaction on mercury-198, our approach produces
mercury-197 which then decays in a few days to the only stable
isotope of gold.
Using our approach, power plants can generate five thousand
kilograms of gold per year, per gigawatt of electricity
generation (~2.5 GWth), without any compromise to
fuel self-sufficiency or power output.
This marks the beginning of a new Golden Age, not only for the
production of critical minerals, but also for energy,
prosperity, and scientific discovery.
Marathon's Mission
Since our founding in 2023, we've
developed fuel cycle technologies to deliver fusion energy
more quickly with better economics.
Marathon Fusion was founded by Adam
Rutkowski, previously a Propulsion Engineer at SpaceX
and PhD candidate in Plasma Physics at Princeton University,
and Kyle Schiller, previously a Fellow in science
policy at Schmidt Futures.
We believed then, and now more than ever,
that fusion is humanity's best pathway to abundant, clean
and reliable energy.
While awaiting formal peer-review, the
pre-print is generating excitement among leading scientists:
"This new technology approach that
Marathon Fusion is developing changes fundamentally how
we should think about fusion as an energy source."
"The technology described could have
a major impact on the economics of fusion energy if it's
able to be fully realized and integrated into upcoming
power plants. Improved economics could further relax
some engineering and scientific requirements,
accelerating the path to commercial deployment.
This is potentially highly impactful,
and I'll be paying close attention to the results of
rigorous peer review"
"The discovery of scalable gold
transmutation by leveraging fusion neutrons could
fundamentally shift the techno-economic landscape.
Marathon Fusion's breakthrough -
commercial-scale gold synthesis via nuclear reactions -
redefines fusion economics and could unlock the capital
needed for next-generation power plants."
A Golden Age for Fusion
Marathon's techno-economic modeling
suggests that fusion plants could create as much economic
value from gold production as they do from electricity
production, potentially doubling the value of these
facilities, radically transforming the economics of fusion
and of energy more broadly.
We aim to leverage this advance alongside
policy and investment to accelerate large-scale deployment
of fusion energy.
Even beyond gold, the possibilities are abundant: creating
other precious metals like palladium, synthesizing medical
isotopes at scale, and producing materials for nuclear
batteries.
Alchemy-native fusion reactors can also
be rethought to take advantage of relaxed economic
constraints, opening up opportunities in simpler and more
scalable approaches.
Towards a New Frontier
Throughout history, scientific
development has been key to furthering human understanding
and flourishing. Now more than ever, optimism and innovation
are needed to address the world's critical challenges.
As in every age, there are inventors, scientists, and
adventurers: those who push forward into the unknown.
