Marathon Fusion, a California-based company founded three years ago, says it has turned mercury into stable gold through nuclear fusion, beating the CERN’s previous record by a factor of 10, or roughly 290 picograms of gold. The company also says it enriched isotopes in the world’s most powerful plasma centrifuge and is now building a fusion reactor in San Francisco designed to achieve a record power density. Its July 2025 study estimates that an optimized system could produce about two tonnes of gold-197 per gigawatt of thermal power per year, although these figures remain theoretical. Industrial production is constrained by the radioactivity of the gold, its energy costs and the availability of mercury, whose global production fell to 210 tonnes in 2025, compared with 3,300 tonnes of mined gold.
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