A startup energy company, called Marathon Fusion, may soon be living out the dream of alchemists from the Middle Ages. In a recently released paper posted to the arXiv preprint server, the company outlines a method to turn an isotope of mercury, 198Hg, into 197Au, the most stable form of gold.
Sounds great. I can’t wait for the price of gold to crash. There are so many applications that would benefit from having a cheap chemically inert metal. Also, the electrical conductivity is pretty amazing, so I don’t think the demand for gold is going down any time soon.
As it stands, gold is way too expensive, and we’ve had to come up with all sorts of exotic alternatives to it. The obvious choice has been sitting in front of our noses all this time, but price has prevented us from actually using it very much.