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.
1st problem is that the mercury will highly likely poison the fusion plasma. The blanket is already a hard engineering problem to have it work in a “regular fusion reactor”. 2nd problem nobody has said anything about is that you get a mixture of radioactive isotopes out of (a supposedly working) a transmutation reactor. This adds to required enrichment processes: to get 100% mercury-198 (from 10%) and possibly a purification of the freshly radioactive gold.
I’d imagine radioactive gold is pretty much worthless. The Au-197 is metastable, and to my flaky understanding will emit gamma-rays, not to mention the other isotopes generated around Au-197.