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Nope, this doesn’t create gold, just helps existing gold accumulate in certain conditions. Actual gold creation requires nuclear reactions, which are technically possible but not practical.



Maybe not as impractical as you think.

Gold could be made by neutron capture on Hg-196. This is a rare isotope, so doing so would require two things: cheap neutrons, and a cheap way to enrich that isotope.

Helion's FRC scheme could provide the first if operated on DD (even if just at engineering breakeven). As for the latter, there's a scheme that's been proposed for mercury isotope separation that exploits the change in magnetic moment of mercury atoms when they are optically excited. This would use radiation from a mercury lamp that itself uses isotopically separated mercury to produce radiation that would selectively excite just that isotope, and steer the atoms in a beam using a magnetic track.

(This isotope separation technique has been proposed as a way to make fluorescent lights more efficient by reducing UV photon trapping in mercury vapor.)

The world's mercury production is low enough and this isotope rare enough that this wouldn't affect gold prices.




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