The dream of the ancient alchemists may come true as Marathon Fusion announces that its tokamak fusion reactor technology can turn common mercury into gold as a byproduct of fusion operations in quantities that would make Auric Goldfinger blush.
The dream of the ancient alchemists may come true as Marathon Fusion announces that its tokamak fusion reactor technology can turn common mercury into gold as a byproduct of fusion operations in quantities that would make Auric Goldfinger blush.
They are gonna spend more time carting away gold than generating electricity. If this is real, and I have my uneducated doubts, why would they tell anyone about it? They will be wildly rich with such a proven gold generation source.
Easier to get investors to just throw money at you than to actually make the product.
Thats exactly my point, fleece the investors, and it doesnt matter if the tech works or not.
I don’t know why you got downvoted, this is genuinely the most likely reason. If they had proven this technology, they could fund themselves. Right now they just have a hypothesis
Because Lemmy has that single person that downvotes everything. They probably think it’s their “cool thing” and we’re all wondering who it is and are always talking about them, but no one notices. It’s just normal to see a single downvote when there’s many upvotes.
Not once they’ve produced enough gold to make it worthless.
Aluminum used to be one of the rarest, most-precious metals on earth. Now it’s used as a disposable container.
Jesus. Imagine if we could make gold cheap enough to make into soda cans. They wouldn’t even need that plastic liner. A truly infinitely recycleable solution to packaging of all sorts. Imagine if the bag on the inside of cereal boxes was made from gold foil. What’s so great about gold is it’s incredibly chemically stable. That means it won’t interact chemically with any food you package in it. And it’s an element, not some forever chemical that will pollute our bodies and environment.
I want to see a world where all cheap disposable packaging is made out of gold.
Being an element doesnt exclude it from poisoning/pollution. Lead is an element and it’ll happily poison people. Quick google suggests gold will kill at dosages 2g/kg, so probably dont want to ingest too much.
Gold isnt very strong on its own, so in order to use it for foil food packaging, it would require being attached to something else, which brings back the plastics part :(
Dude, spoilers! /s
If they kept it a secret, they could sell the gold continuously while the value slowly crashes, and still make a ton of money. But if you tell the world you can make gold for “free”, the value craters overnight and you get nothing.
The units are weird, and the person writing the article seems to have conflated a few different quantities.
From the actual press release linked in the article:
So unless I’ve also missed something, what they actually mean is 5 tons per year assuming a continuous power output of 2.5GW, which is roughly 22TWh of energy generation.
Or in slightly more approachable units, approximately 0.23g/MWh.
GWth means 1GW of thermal energy, nothing to do with tons.
The paragraph of note from the preprint paper:
The paper seems to report an upper bound of 3000 kg/GWth/yr.
There does seems to be some conflating of GWth (GW of thermal power) with GWe(GW of electrical power). Assuming an efficiency of ~60% would make the numbers line up and that seems in the ballpark of possible conversion efficiencies.
Because not everyone in the world is a goblin?
I wish I had your optimism. This is a for-profit company making a press release. They are goblins.