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[Article] Marathon Fusion says it can produce gold as fusion reactor byproduct (newatlas.com)
submitted 1 year ago by to c/interestingshare@lemmy.zip
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The dream of the ancient alchemists may come true as Marathon Fusion announces that its tokamak fusion reactor technology can turn common mercury into gold as a byproduct of fusion operations in quantities that would make Auric Goldfinger blush.

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[–] 23 points 1 year ago (5 children)

Not once they've produced enough gold to make it worthless.

Aluminum used to be one of the rarest, most-precious metals on earth. Now it's used as a disposable container.

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  • [–] 7 points 1 year ago

    If they kept it a secret, they could sell the gold continuously while the value slowly crashes, and still make a ton of money. But if you tell the world you can make gold for "free", the value craters overnight and you get nothing.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago (1 child)

    Jesus. Imagine if we could make gold cheap enough to make into soda cans. They wouldn't even need that plastic liner. A truly infinitely recycleable solution to packaging of all sorts. Imagine if the bag on the inside of cereal boxes was made from gold foil. What's so great about gold is it's incredibly chemically stable. That means it won't interact chemically with any food you package in it. And it's an element, not some forever chemical that will pollute our bodies and environment.

    I want to see a world where all cheap disposable packaging is made out of gold.

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  • [–] 6 points 1 year ago

    Being an element doesnt exclude it from poisoning/pollution. Lead is an element and it'll happily poison people. Quick google suggests gold will kill at dosages 2g/kg, so probably dont want to ingest too much.

    Gold isnt very strong on its own, so in order to use it for foil food packaging, it would require being attached to something else, which brings back the plastics part :(

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