There's a new paper that covers this topic more broadly. It points out that there are medical isotopes that are much more expensive than gold which can push even today's experimental fusion reactors towards economic viability. While the market size for these is limited in a way that gold isn't, they can help create a pathway to making fusion economical much sooner.
Oh, neat! Thank you very much for bringing my attention to this. Ya, I'm really interested in seeing whether big fusion players like Helion or CFS are going to look into coproduction of valuable elements. I think that would be a strong signal that they think this stuff is viable.
In a world where fusion has negative cost, focusing on producing gold as an incidental product seems weird. It's like someone in 1930 positing computing machines like what we have now, and saying "we'll be able to print more accurate log tables!" as the main selling point.
If this happens I expect the price of gold will drop by a bit more than the raw quantities involved would imply. Gold is seen as *the* safe store of value; hence why the US has a strategic gold reserve of 8000 tonnes, and millions of individuals use it as a way to store their savings that's immune to inflation and other fiat currency instability. Buying gold jewelry can be seen as a temporary expense only, or even an investment, because it can always be sold later for the same amount or more.
If gold becomes the sort of thing you can just *make*, the psychological impact will be powerful.
Your surprise at the size of annual gold production might be partially due to it being denoted in mass. Gold is very dense! When you express it in volume it feels more reasonable: about 200 cubic meters, small enough to fit in the average house, with plenty of room left over.
A little while ago I came across a nice documentary on commercial gold production, and it was striking how tiny the final amounts were. At the end of the video you can see a mockup of the total quantity of gold they've mined in 33 years, and it's miniscule. It could all fit in a single truck.
The question I was most interested in when I saw this was: "Is it possible that we can just forget the concept of fusion for producing energy altogether and focus on making gold?"
You seem to say that this is unlikely to be possible without energy production but I'd like to know more about why. When I took their 2t per GW-year number and divided by the cost of electricity I got something like 0.1. So it seems like the price of gold relative to the price of energy would only have to go up by one order of magnitude for this to be profitable in terms of operational expenditure (granted, that's a lot, but fluctuations this large or larger seem like the kind of thing that could happen on timescales of decades).
The last bit is the best! Who wouldn’t want radioactive gold?
There's a new paper that covers this topic more broadly. It points out that there are medical isotopes that are much more expensive than gold which can push even today's experimental fusion reactors towards economic viability. While the market size for these is limited in a way that gold isn't, they can help create a pathway to making fusion economical much sooner.
https://arxiv.org/pdf/2512.09242
It seems a bit early to say if any of this will work, of course, but it looks very promising.
Oh, neat! Thank you very much for bringing my attention to this. Ya, I'm really interested in seeing whether big fusion players like Helion or CFS are going to look into coproduction of valuable elements. I think that would be a strong signal that they think this stuff is viable.
In a world where fusion has negative cost, focusing on producing gold as an incidental product seems weird. It's like someone in 1930 positing computing machines like what we have now, and saying "we'll be able to print more accurate log tables!" as the main selling point.
If this happens I expect the price of gold will drop by a bit more than the raw quantities involved would imply. Gold is seen as *the* safe store of value; hence why the US has a strategic gold reserve of 8000 tonnes, and millions of individuals use it as a way to store their savings that's immune to inflation and other fiat currency instability. Buying gold jewelry can be seen as a temporary expense only, or even an investment, because it can always be sold later for the same amount or more.
If gold becomes the sort of thing you can just *make*, the psychological impact will be powerful.
Your surprise at the size of annual gold production might be partially due to it being denoted in mass. Gold is very dense! When you express it in volume it feels more reasonable: about 200 cubic meters, small enough to fit in the average house, with plenty of room left over.
A little while ago I came across a nice documentary on commercial gold production, and it was striking how tiny the final amounts were. At the end of the video you can see a mockup of the total quantity of gold they've mined in 33 years, and it's miniscule. It could all fit in a single truck.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fafsQZGEje8
> For reference, the global volume of gold production is ~4000 tonnes.
Is this supposed to be "per year"?
The question I was most interested in when I saw this was: "Is it possible that we can just forget the concept of fusion for producing energy altogether and focus on making gold?"
You seem to say that this is unlikely to be possible without energy production but I'd like to know more about why. When I took their 2t per GW-year number and divided by the cost of electricity I got something like 0.1. So it seems like the price of gold relative to the price of energy would only have to go up by one order of magnitude for this to be profitable in terms of operational expenditure (granted, that's a lot, but fluctuations this large or larger seem like the kind of thing that could happen on timescales of decades).