Marathon Fusion says it can produce gold as fusion reactor byproduct
newatlas.com
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.

  • qupada
    12•4 days ago

    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:

    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.

    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.

    • @[email protected]English
      2•4 days ago

      GWth means 1GW of thermal energy, nothing to do with tons.

      The paragraph of note from the preprint paper:

      Under this simplification, there are ∼ 1.12 × 1028 fusion reactions per year in a 1 GWth fusion device. Assuming neutron multiplication is dominated by (n, 2n) reactions, in order to achieve a TBR = 1.2, at an absolute minimum 20% of all fusion reactions must have a corresponding (n, 2n) reaction in the blanket; as a less conservative value, it is known that simplified blanket configurations (2 m thick, no structure, natural Li) can achieve as high as TBR ∼ 1.85 [26], in which case at least 85% of fusion reactions must have a corresponding multiplication reaction. This range corresponds to 3.7 × 103–1.6 × 104 mol/yr, or for a product with a mass of 197 amu, 732 − 3114 kg/yr of material production.

      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.