Can you chemically make gold

John Matson is a former reporter and editor for Scientific American who has written extensively about astronomy and physics. Follow John Matson on Twitter. Already a subscriber?

Sign in. Thanks for reading Scientific American. Create your free account or Sign in to continue. See Subscription Options. Go Paperless with Digital. Get smart. Sign up for our email newsletter. Sign Up. Support science journalism.

Knowledge awaits. Once the ore has been pulverized, chemical techniques are sufficient to separate the gold from the lead. The result is almost alchemy. Actively scan device characteristics for identification. Use precise geolocation data. Select personalised content. Create a personalised content profile. Measure ad performance. Select basic ads. Create a personalised ads profile. Select personalised ads. Apply market research to generate audience insights.

Measure content performance. Develop and improve products. List of Partners vendors. Share Flipboard Email. Anne Marie Helmenstine, Ph. Chemistry Expert. Helmenstine holds a Ph. She has taught science courses at the high school, college, and graduate levels. For example, Sherr, Bainbridge, and Anderson created gold in by shooting neutrons at mercury. The neutrons were generated by a series of nuclear reactions that were kick-started by the Harvard cyclotron particle accelerator.

Usually gold is created from platinum, which has one less proton than gold, or from mercury, which has one more proton than gold. Bombarding a platinum or mercury nucleus with neutrons can knock off an neutron or add on a neutron, which through natural radioactive decay can lead to gold.

As should be obvious by this production process, much of the gold created from other elements is radioactive. Radioactive gold is hazardous to humans and cannot be sold commercially. Furthermore, when radioactive gold undergoes radioactive decay after a few days, it is no longer gold. Therefore, in order to create non-radioactive gold that you can sell to consumers you have to:. It should be obvious from this process that it currently costs much more money to create non-radioactive gold than you could ever earn by selling the gold.

Creating gold from other elements is currently an expensive laboratory experiment and not a viable commercial activity. Perhaps technology will improve enough in the future to make creation of gold in nuclear reactors a profitable economic enterprise.