Lab-Grown Gold to Crash Prices? San Francisco’s Marathon Fusion Just Turned Mercury Into Yellow Metal
The company said the metal could contain radioactive isotopes and might need to sit for up to 18 years before sale.
- On Wednesday, San Francisco-based Marathon Fusion announced it successfully transmuted mercury into stable gold, claiming to beat CERN's record by a factor of 10.
- Founded in 2023 by Kyle Schiller and former SpaceX engineer Adam Rutkowski, the company counts Breakthrough Energy, founded by Bill Gates, and mining group Anglo American among its backers.
- Marathon fires neutrons from fusion reactions at mercury to create unstable isotopes that decay into gold, though the material may require up to 18 years of storage due to radioactivity, and the claim remains unverified.
- A theoretical fleet of 100 fusion plants could produce an estimated 500 tonnes of gold annually, roughly 14% of last year's mine output, though there are currently no public plans to commercialize the product.
- Gold traded at $4,062 an ounce on Thursday, remaining more than 27% below its January record high of $5,598, as central banks in China and Poland continue to hold the metal as a store of value.
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An American company claims to have turned mercury into stable gold through nuclear reactions, in an experiment that, if confirmed, could open up new possibilities for the production of precious metal. Marathon Fusion, a fusion energy startup based in San Francisco, says it performed the procedure in September and surpassed ten times a mark attributed to the European Center for Nuclear Research (CERN). However, the company did not report the amou…
This is the U.S. company Marathon Fusion, a young fusion energy company based in San Francisco
An American Startup Announces that It Has Turned Mercury Into "Real Gold" and Explains How It Did It
Marathon Fusion, a small San Francisco firm, says it turned mercury into stable gold. The amount obtained would be ten times higher than the CERN record. The announcement raises the question of whether the gold in the...
Lab-grown gold to crash prices? San Francisco’s Marathon Fusion just turned mercury into yellow metal
Marathon Fusion, a San Francisco-based start-up, claims to have converted mercury into stable gold using nuclear transmutation, saying it surpassed CERNs record by 10 times. However, it has not disclosed the quantity produced or shared experimental data, leaving the claims scale and commercial potential unclear.
Turning mercury into gold? A US start-up says it has just done it
Little-known San Francisco start-up Marathon Fusion says it has turned mercury into stable gold at ten times the rate of CERN's record, raising a question that has haunted the diamond trade: could lab-made gold one day sink the price of the mined metal?
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