Atoms into gold: alchemy's modern resurgence

For thousands of years, the practice of alchemy — chemically transforming minerals into gold — has been attempted and failed. While it is generally considered a pseudoscience by modern standards, recent developments have some researchers reopening the potential golden door. At the heart of this resurgence in alchemy is nuclear power, which itself has seen significant advances in the 21st century. But will it make alchemy possible, or is this just another pipe dream?

What kind of modern alchemy is being attempted?

Several ideas have been proposed with the intention of turning minerals into gold using nuclear power. The most notable comes from Marathon Fusion, which released an action plan detailing its purported ability to "synthesize stable gold from the abundant mercury isotope." Known as transmutation, this is "essentially the process of turning one element into another by tweaking its nucleus," said Gizmodo.

The exact science, according to Marathon, involves "introducing mercury-198 into a fusion reactor and bombarding it with neutrons until it transforms into mercury-197," said Gizmodo. Mercury-197 is a much more unstable isotope of mercury, and because of this it "decays into gold-197, the only stable isotope of gold." The entire process would reportedly take about 64 hours.

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Marathon's research "suggests it would be possible to make five metric tons of gold a year for every gigawatt of power generated," said The Times. If this nuclear technology is successful, the "3,500-odd metric tons of gold currently mined every year could soon be dwarfed by the amount produced by fusion."

How promising is this?

There are "lots of reasons to be skeptical about this claim of abundant gold," said The Times. For one, there are the fusion reactors themselves that would be necessary to create gold. Marathon hopes that the "millions of dollars made from selling the precious metal could be used to offset the cost" of nuclear power, said The Atlantic. But while "experimental fusion reactors that can make electricity have been built, the technology hasn't advanced enough to allow fusion to be practical on a commercial scale."

Marathon's alchemy would also require a significant amount of power to run, and scientists are "only beginning to crack the point at which fusion plants generate more energy than they require to operate," said Futurism. This means that scaling the nuclear operations will be "difficult, with scientists struggling to contain extremely high-energy and unpredictable plasma inside enormously complex reactors."

Another notable aspect is the gold itself; because of the nuclear process involved, any gold created from mercury may be at least slightly "radioactive, which could mean it would have to be stored for anywhere from 14 to 18 years before it's safe to handle," said Futurism. This makes it difficult to generate the gold at scale.

Despite these challenges, scientists remain hopeful, though Marathon's proposal has not yet been peer-reviewed. On "paper, it looks great and everyone so far that I talk to remains intrigued and excited," said Dr. Ahmed Diallo, a plasma physicist at the U.S. Department of Energy's national laboratory at Princeton University, to the Financial Times.

Gold is "that sweet spot," said Dan Brunner, a former chief technology officer at Commonwealth Fusion Systems and an adviser to Marathon, to the Times. From a "purely scientific perspective, it looks like it all hangs together. I think the challenge comes" with "actually engineering it into a practical system."