Nuclear reaction comes to the rescue.
It turns out that the long-standing dream of alchemists to transform base metals into gold is quite real. However, this is only possible within the framework of nuclear chemistry. In a nuclear reactor, one element can transform into another; for example, uranium turns into plutonium, sulfur into chlorine, and iron into nickel. Under such conditions, it is also possible to “create” artificial gold.
Synthetic gold was produced as early as 1947 by American scientists, and in confirmation of this fact, 35 micrograms of gold obtained from 100 milligrams of mercury is stored at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago.
The most accessible method for producing artificial gold involves the radioactive decay of certain isotopes of neighboring elements, such as mercury and platinum. Although the transformation of platinum into gold is economically unfeasible, as platinum is also a precious metal. Gold-197 (the only stable isotope of gold) can be obtained from mercury-197, which emits beta rays.
Nevertheless, all these processes are extremely costly and labor-intensive, yielding only a negligible amount of “noble metal,” which still needs to be separated from the mixture of nuclides and unreacted isotopes. As a result, the price of synthetic gold turns out to be astronomically high, making it impossible to profit from its production.
Moreover, some nuclear reactions lead to the formation of unstable isotopes of gold, which have a lifespan of only a few days. After that, radioactive gold, indistinguishable from natural gold, quickly turns into mercury.
