Last week, Marathon Fusion, a San Francisco-based energy startup, submitted a preprint detailing an action plan for synthesizing gold particles via nuclear transmutation—essentially the process of turning one element into another by tweaking its nucleus. The paper, which has yet to undergo peer review, argues that the proposed system would offer a new revenue stream from all the new gold being produced, in addition to other economic and technological benefits.
I was wondering how radioactive the resulting material would be. Twenty years is totally viable for a power plant. Reactors in the US have been storing nuclear waste on site for a lot longer than that.