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Comment by floxy | Hacker News Reader

>In practice, given that much of all gold is used to store value and is not actively in use, we do not expect the need to store it for 7–17 years to be a major impediment; at worst, it means that the product will initially have somewhat less value than pure 197Au, and so some discount should be applied to the value of freshly produced gold.

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but when we are generating literal tons of gold for free, won't gold no longer be a good store of value because it will no longer be scarce?

It’s not free, also we generate new gold with mining.

A 1GW reactor (nuclear fission reactors are usually 1GW, and you'll have a couple or several at a single plant) would produce something like 5-10 metric tons of gold in a year. According to USGS[1] there has been 187,000 metric tons of gold produced and another 57,000 metric tons known about but not yet mined.

There are currently hundreds of nuclear fission reactors in the world so if you assume a similar number of fusion reactors, you'll get thousands of metric tons per year of gold production. World gold production was ~3,600 metric tons in 2022 [2].

So ultimately, yes, it would impact the price, but it will be many decades before we have hundreds of fusion power plants producing all that gold, and so it's not going to saturate the market for a long time. It may never saturate the market if demand for gold continues to go up in the coming decades.

1. https://www.usgs.gov/faqs/how-much-gold-has-been-found-world 2. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gold_mining#Statistics

You guys have a lot more faith than I do in people's ability to have rational beliefs about nuclear waste.

I agree with you, but people can also be very irrational about the value of gold.

Most people would never know, if it wouldn’t be for every gold-related company having a vested interest in making people scared of it.

Plus, 20 years is really not very long for it to be completely harmless; just ask the world’s supplies of whiskeys that really only start to have any value after 10+ years.

Industrial gold demand for use in electronics is about 250 tonnes per year. Much of that likely doesn't care about slight radioactivity?

Maybe you wouldn't use that gold for bond wires (but they are less used now and mostly copper AFAIK).

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