San Francisco company claims it can create gold in a Lab!

Marathon Fusion, based in San Francisco, claims that gold can be created as a byproduct of the fusion process used by nuclear reactors. The company stated that over three days, the ‘nuclear transmutation’ process turns mercury-197, an isotope produced during fusion, into gold. 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.

The gold is supposedly indistinguishable from mined gold chemically and physically. There is one catch – a ‘cool down’ period of between 14 and 18 years for short-lived radioactive impurities to decay. The method is similar to one proposed to allow reactors to manufacture their tritium fuel. This is done by lining the reactor vessel with a layer of lithium. When the lithium absorbs a neutron from the fusion reaction, it splits into an alpha particle and a tritium atom. If you replace the lithium with the very common mercury-198 isotope, a fast neutron will turn it into unstable mercury-197.

The company ‘Marathon Fusion’ was founded in 2023 by Adam Rutkowski, a former engineer of Elon Musk’s SpaceX.