Marathon Fusion, a San Francisco startup, claims to have turned mercury into stable gold through nuclear transmutation (like alchemists). CERN has done this before, but Marathon Fusion claims to have exceeded its quantum record by 10 times. Marathon Fusion's process uses high-energy neutrons from a fusion reaction of deuterium and tritium to convert mercury-198 into mercury-197, which then decays into stable gold-197. The gold that is created has to decompose; What to do with it is still unclear. The estimated cost of the process after scale is two tons of gold per gigawatt of energy invested. This is about one standard nuclear power plant unit per year. In the movie "Back to the Future", the DeLorean time machine needed 1.21 gigawatts to jump.

Marathon Fusion, a San Francisco startup, claims to have turned mercury into stable gold through nuclear transmutation (like alchemists). CERN has done this before, but Marathon Fusion claims to have exceeded its quantum record by 10 times. Marathon Fusion's process uses high-energy neutrons from a fusion reaction of deuterium and tritium to convert mercury-198 into mercury-197, which then decays into stable gold-197. The gold that is created has to decompose; What to do with it is still unclear. The estimated cost of the process after scale is two tons of gold per gigawatt of energy invested. This is about one standard nuclear power plant unit per year. In the movie "Back to the Future", the DeLorean time machine needed 1.21 gigawatts to jump.