• JATth@lemmy.worldEnglish
    35·
    7 hours ago

    arxiv.org: a pre-print source, this is not peer-reviewed yet. So, until other papers refer to this paper, it has low significance in the literature. The paper has references to other papers and to previous corpus of knowledge on the subject, which is good. However, this paper is based on simulations only.

    Crucially, the scheme identified here does not negatively impact electricity production, and is also compatible with the challenging tritium breeding requirements of fusion power plant design because (n, 2n) reactions of 198Hg drive both transmutation and neutron multiplication

    Monte Carlo transport calculations show that neutrons produced in a tokamak power plant can convert the abundant isotope 198Hg to stable 197Au via the (n,2n) channel, yielding several tonnes of gold per plant-year without compromising the tritium breeding ratio.

    The decommissioned blanket material would increase in value, and the Mercury-198 in the blanket doesn’t majorly impact its effectiveness in transmuting lithium to tritium.

    The “worst” gold isotope half-life is less than a year, so only a modest cool-down is needed for the output:

    197Au to be Class 7 when activity concentration is > 2700 pCi/g, which is reached after 13.7 years for the initial concentration listed.

    An even more stringent constraint can be applied for any gold that will be regularly handled by the general population. As a highly conservative requirement, we can stipulate that this gold must be less radioactive than a banana. Due to 40K content, bananas have an activity of ∼ 3520 pCi/kg, or about 420 pCi for a single banana. To meet this requirement, a troy ounce of gold with the initial isotope mix shown in Table 2 must sit for about 17.7 years to be below a banana equivalent level of activity.

    What strikes me here with this paper is the suggested liquid blanket, so this would be a kin of D-T Fusion MSR. We now have two proposed technologies behind being able handle hot radioactive liquids.

    • humanspiral@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      34 minutes ago

      The safe level isn’t that important, because the gold can be put into an ETF investment vehicle, which is a substantial enough demand for gold. National reserves (the vast majority of gold demand) too are long term holders.

      2t/GWhth is a huge amount. While the best case economics for fusion is 30c/kwh cost = $3m/Gwhe, that would be 3GWhth = 6T of gold. Even at $45/oz (1/100th of current value) that would be $8m/Gwhe revenue, and would likely be able to sell electricity at market rates as the “waste product”, or not even bother with the expense/complexity of electricity generation.

    • Goodtoknow@lemmy.caEnglish
      20·
      5 hours ago

      must sit for about 17.7 years to be below a banana equivalent level of activity.

      Banana for scale!

    • dejected_warp_core@lemmy.worldEnglish
      3·
      4 hours ago

      It also helps that we’re talking about rather dense nuclei too. So it’s not just a neutron absorbing blanket, but a rather high-performing one at that. Which you need to convert fusion outputs to heat and power anyway. And gold is soluble in mercury anyway, so extraction is already a known (albeit incredibly dangerous) process. Win-win.

      yielding several tonnes of gold per plant-year

      Mother of god that’s a lot to magic-up outta nowhere. At first I thought this would disrupt the market, but it looks like yearly global gold production is around 3000 tons a year. So it would take a lot of reactors to impact the gold market, so… yeah. Reactors really could start paying for themselves.

      • ulterno@programming.devEnglish
        1·
        1 hour ago

        Reactors really could start paying for themselves.

        Yeah, that should help them with their capital, storage costs and Hg procurement costs.
        Now back to the energy generation…

  • _stranger_@lemmy.worldEnglish
    11·
    7 hours ago

    As soon as they figure out how to turn lead into porn, we’ll be driving personal fusion powered space cars to mars.

      • rumba@lemmy.zipEnglish
        5·
        6 hours ago

        Helion got really quiet since that last venture push :)

        I’ve seen a few pretty solid questions about the lack of shielding around their running equipment being a red flag that their output is nowhere near what they claimed.

  • Gil Wanderley@lemmy.eco.brEnglish
    18·
    12 hours ago

    Wasn’t the plan to use the neutrons generated by D-T fusion to generate more tritium because it is very rare on Earth? Didn’t they even not have enough neutrons to generate enough tritium for self sustaining fueling of fusion that the current plan is to use a beryllium blanket to multiply the neutron flux? Where would the extra neutrons for gold transmutation even come from? Waste from the tritium breeding?

  • REDACTED@infosec.pubEnglish
    17·
    13 hours ago

    I feel like this is one of those things governments might get paranoid about because their treasuries are based on a high (constantly increasing increasing due to limited amount) value of gold. Imagine one country figuring out how to produce gold and then every other treasury starts losing it’s value.

  • Silic0n_Alph4@lemmy.worldEnglish
    1701·
    1 day ago

    Infinite energy for all is cancelled.

    Infinite wealth for the shareholders will go ahead instead.

    • explodicle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
      50·
      22 hours ago

      Infinite gold would be useful for electronics, but it would destroy gold’s utility as a long-term store of value. So the wealth for shareholders would be finite, taken from today’s gold holders.

        • explodicle@sh.itjust.worksEnglish
          5·
          6 hours ago

          I’m no physicist, but it seems like once transmutation is a thing, it won’t stop here.

          It would be like a quantum computer breaking Bitcoin and so we fall back on Ethereum.

            • JATth@lemmy.worldEnglish
              2·
              5 hours ago

              I don’t know, if you gather one proton’s and two neutrons worth of energy, localized entirely within the supposed space of an atom, you could generate mass from energy. However, what that energy converts into, is entirely random, so I would guess most of the time you just get realllly high energy photons out of it.

                • JATth@lemmy.worldEnglish
                  3·
                  4 hours ago

                  You have seen the equations? 99% you don’t get anything useful or somehow split the fucking universe, so that time-reversed flow of information won’t break the causality. (And it fucking does break the universe, the local bubble we are in. Please, don’t google false-vacuum.) We don’t even know the speed of light in one-direction, because information travels at the fucking speed of light, whatever that is. Yet, you measure a spin of electron, and the other fucker in the opposite side of the universe, is known to be opposite in the instant.

                  The action is minimized by nature, in one way or other, even if this means punching a hole in the space-time continuum, to start a tree-of-universes descending from the host.

                  /s (I had enough beer for today.)

    • N0t_5ure@lemmy.worldEnglish
      76·
      1 day ago

      “If," [“the management consultant”] said tersely, “we could for a moment move on to the subject of fiscal policy. . .” “Fiscal policy!" whooped Ford Prefect. “Fiscal policy!" The management consultant gave him a look that only a lungfish could have copied. “Fiscal policy. . .” he repeated, “that is what I said.” “How can you have money,” demanded Ford, “if none of you actually produces anything? It doesn’t grow on trees you know.” “If you would allow me to continue… .” Ford nodded dejectedly. “Thank you. Since we decided a few weeks ago to adopt the leaf as legal tender, we have, of course, all become immensely rich.” Ford stared in disbelief at the crowd who were murmuring appreciatively at this and greedily fingering the wads of leaves with which their track suits were stuffed. “But we have also,” continued the management consultant, “run into a small inflation problem on account of the high level of leaf availability, which means that, I gather, the current going rate has something like three deciduous forests buying one ship’s peanut." Murmurs of alarm came from the crowd. The management consultant waved them down. “So in order to obviate this problem,” he continued, “and effectively revalue the leaf, we are about to embark on a massive defoliation campaign, and. . .er, burn down all the forests. I think you’ll all agree that’s a sensible move under the circumstances." The crowd seemed a little uncertain about this for a second or two until someone pointed out how much this would increase the value of the leaves in their pockets whereupon they let out whoops of delight and gave the management consultant a standing ovation. The accountants among them looked forward to a profitable autumn aloft and it got an appreciative round from the crowd.”

      ― Douglas Adams, The Restaurant at the End of the Universe

      • gandalf_der_12te@discuss.tchncs.deEnglish
        1·
        1 hour ago

        the thing is you can’t burn other people’s leaves (because they’re not yours), only your own, so you’re the only one who loses out if you do this.

  • bjoern_tantau@swg-empire.deEnglish
    71·
    1 day ago

    I’d really love to travel back in time and first amaze an alchemist that their future colleagues will be able to turn lead into gold. Only to crush them again by explaining that the process is too expensive.

    • TheFogan@programming.devEnglish
      37·
      1 day ago

      I mean I guess the concept there though is, isn’t making things into gold pointless anyway. We can lab make diamonds too, the jewelry industry works to keep them as a distinct alternate product to protect their slave mined ones. Is the quantity used for electronics enough that it would make a difference in typical manufacturing?

      Actually kind of the ironic thing to me based on the time. Did gold have a practical use in the days of alchemy? I mean obviously mass producing gold, basically would have made it completely useless back then, it could make a small group of people very rich, provided they kept the method secret and were careful about how much they sold. It seems like the whole idea was flawed on it’s head even if they hadn’t based it on completely incorrect basis of the world.

      • drosophila@lemmy.blahaj.zoneEnglish
        2·
        5 hours ago

        Alchemists (correctly) observed that everything in the world was subject to disorder and decay as time progressed, but noted that gold seemed to be immune to this effect (since it is highly resistant to oxidation). Add into that the belief system that they were working with:

        • That everything in the world exists on a chain of being from the most corrupt at the bottom to the most noble on top (with god being most high).

        • That everything is really the same thing, and through physical processes changes its form, including up and down the chain.

        And they belived that if they could figure out how to transmute a lesser metal into a more noble one then they could probably move other things up the chain of being as well. Which is why the Philospher’s Stone was supposed to make people unaging and immortal, and cure all disease, in addition to transmuting lesser metals into gold. Alchemists like John of Rupescissa probably belived that creating the Stone would also bring the world closer to the divine in some way, and it was god’s wish for mortals to do this.

      • neatchee@piefed.socialEnglish
        25·
        1 day ago

        The jewelry and investment industries make up 45-50% of gold consumption. Practical and industrial uses make up only 5-10%.

        As such, while flooding the market with cheap gold would rapidly lower value, that’s unlikely to be how the gold is sold. If the amount of gold being generated from fusion reactors is orders of magnitude less than the global consumption rate from jewelry and investment, which seems likely, and they are selling at our near market value rather than trying to undercut everyone, then the value of the generated gold would remain relatively stable.

        in other words, considering that the gold market generates something like $350bn USD per year, and the total market value of “above ground” gold around $25tn USD, even if fusion reactors generate $1bn USD worth of gold it would have a negligible impact on the price of gold while providing significant value to the reactor operators (incentivizing the growth of the fusion reactor industry)

  • brucethemoose@lemmy.worldEnglish
    171·
    1 day ago

    My first thought was “what happens to all that gold under neutron irradiation?” Apparently it transmutes back to Mercury 198 with beta decay, which is the wrong isotope. But if Mercury 198 gets hit again… I think it turns into 199, which is also stable?

    https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold-198

    A lot of papers for these reactions are behind stupid subscription paywalls :(

    Still though, it does seem extremely fortuitous, and it’s possible the gold doesn’t become impossibly radioactive. Maybe there’s some other chain that will cause problems, but the immediate concern in the bulk materials seems… alright.

    • humanspiral@lemmy.caEnglish
      1·
      17 minutes ago

      uhm… if gold198 turns back into mercury in 64 hours, and is radioactive in the meantime… that sucks. But what they are doing is turning Mercury198 into mercury197, and that decays into (real) gold197 … afaiu.