Rutkowski and Schiller say this means future fusion power plants that adopt this approach would be able to produce 5,000kg of gold a year, per gigawatt of electricity generation, without reducing the power output or tritium-breeding capacity of the system. At current prices, they estimate that amount of gold would be worth roughly the same as the electricity being generated, potentially doubling the revenue of the plant.
“The key insight here is that you can use this set of fast neutron reactions to make really large quantities of gold while satisfying the fuel cycle requirements of the system,” said Rutkowski, who previously worked at SpaceX.
