Modern alchemy: could a nuclear gold rush be upon us?
Alchemists thought it was possible to turn lead into gold. Most were con artists, but others — like Sir Isaac Newton, who gave us the laws of motion but spent his spare time trying to find the philosopher’s stone, the vital ingredient to make the process work — were serious.
If only Sir Isaac had been born 400 years later. A modern version of alchemy has turned up; one that appears to have some basis in science rather than relying on an undiscovered magic rock.
• Start-up says it will use nuclear fusion to turn mercury into gold
The paper suggests it would be possible to make five tonnes of gold a year for every gigawatt of power generated. To put that into context, the new nuclear station at Hinkley Point in Somerset is designed to generate 3.2 gigawatts. A Hinkley Point-rated fusion station would be producing 16 tonnes of gold a year, worth £1.2 billion at the current market price. If the new technology became widespread, the 3,500-odd tonnes of gold currently mined every year could soon be dwarfed by the amount produced by fusion.
There are lots of reasons to be sceptical about this claim of abundant gold, which we will come to in a minute. But there are some interesting things to bear in mind.
The authors have decent scientific credentials: as well as Rutkowski, the two other contributors were Jake Harter, an engineering intern at Marathon, and Adam Parisi, who has a physics PhD from Oxford and now works at the Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory. Also, the science is not out of line with what has gone before, unlike, for example, the cold fusion claims 36 years ago by Martin Fleischmann and Stanley Pons, two academics at the University of Utah.
Scientists know that a future fusion reactor could create the right conditions for the kind of elemental transformation proposed. If you bombard mercury atoms with neutrons produced in abundance in fusion reactions, then you will get a form of mercury that degrades into gold.
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Turning theory into reality, however, is the big stumbling block. Fusion is a wonderful idea — lots of clean energy from putting atoms together rather than splitting them apart — but it is, as sceptics often say, a technology that is perpetually 25 years away.
Recent successes have prompted a flood of private money into new companies, but there is no guarantee commercial fusion power will happen. Even if it did, the next step — finding the right engineering techniques to make the mercury-to-gold transformation feasible — is another big hurdle. Another thing to consider is that the gold produced would be radioactive, although it should be safe to use after about 13 years in storage.
Who knows if this stream of gold will ever arrive, but it does prompt an interesting thought: what happens if the metal we have been using as a store of value for the past 6,000 years becomes abundant?
Gold’s value comes from scarcity. There is not much point in owning it if it is readily available. There would be some obvious consequences; governments’ gold reserves would gradually become worthless (the UK has 310 tonnes stashed away). No major currency is still backed by gold, but you wouldn’t rule out some currency instability as the ramification of that loss of government assets filtered through the market. Personal holdings would also lose their value as would jewellery, although you would imagine that the best pieces would keep some of their worth.
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Probably the biggest effect on investors, however, would be psychological. Without gold, where is the hedge against inflation, the thing to turn to when everything else looks shaky? Bitcoin or some other crypto asset will be some people’s answer, but they are still untested compared with gold’s thousands of years of trading history, and you can’t sew bitcoin into the hem of your jacket when you have to make that midnight dash across the border to safety.
There are other metals which might fit the bill. Silver is perhaps too abundant, but if you go the other way there is. For example, osmium, which is rarer than gold but doesn’t share its lustrous appearance. Fine art, real estate, gemstones — all might play a part, but none quite have gold’s combination of transportability, scarcity and near-universal acceptance.
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Maybe we will have to get used to a world without gold as the back-stop. Britain dropped the gold standard for sterling in 1931, the US for the dollar 40 years later, and life carried on. In any event, if this ever does become an issue, it is for future generations. No one expects a commercial fusion power plant much before the late 2030s or even the following decade. A long time before the alchemist’s dream comes even close to reality.
PS Heathrow should next week publish its plans for a third runway. This project has had many false dawns, and it takes a leap of faith to imagine it will be any different this time round. When the process was paused last time, when the Covid-19 pandemic brought things to a halt, all the politics was out of the way and the airport was preparing a development consent order, in essence the planning application for the whole thing. We are not going to pick up there again next week.
Heathrow will outline its plans, but then the government will go away to see if changes to the national policy statement — the thing that paved the way for the consent order — need to be made. In other words, we will be straight back into the politics of Heathrow expansion. This will test if Labour is really serious about backing a new runway, a big ask given the leadership’s shaky command of the back benches.
Dominic O’Connell is business presenter for Times Radio