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 would assume that this would lead to a rise in mercury mining instead of cleaning up Mercury contaminations, because that would probably be cheaper. And I don’t think mercury mining is any less toxic than gold mining.