Could lab-made gold crash prices like diamonds? US start-up says it turned mercury into gold

[Marlin]

The alchemists had it all wrong they should have been using mercury not lead. 

Could lab-made gold crash prices like diamonds? US start-up says it turned mercury into gold

https://www.euronews.com/2026/10/23/could-lab-made-gold-crash-prices-like-diamonds-us-start-up-says-it-turned-mercury-into-gol

[Core Content]

Turning mercury into gold? A US start-up says it has just done it

San Francisco start-up Marathon Fusion announced it converted mercury into stable gold using fusion reactions. The company claims its method surpassed a previous record set by CERN by a factor of ten. The process uses neutrons to create an unstable isotope that decays into gold.

The fusion technology developer suggests commercial power plants could theoretically produce substantial quantities of gold as a byproduct. However, commercial fusion reactors are still years away from generating electricity. Additionally, the resulting metal would require extended radioactive decay storage before it could enter the commercial market.

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?

Marathon Fusion, a small fusion energy company in San Francisco, announced on Wednesday that it had transmuted, or converted, mercury into stable gold last month, beating a record set by CERN tenfold. The Geneva-based organisation runs the world's largest particle physics laboratory. The claim, which has not been independently verified, revives an alchemist's dream and a market fear that lab-made gold could do to bullion what lab-grown precious stones did to diamonds.

Read the full article at euronews:
https://www.euronews.com/2026/10/23/could-lab-made-gold-crash-prices-like-diamonds-us-start-up-says-it-turned-mercury-into-gol