Marathon Fusion to build San Francisco fusion reactor targeting scarce medical isotopes

Marathon Fusion says it transmuted mercury into stable gold using fusion neutrons at 10x CERN's 2025 record, and enriched isotopes in a plasma centrifuge, surpassing a 40-year-old Soviet record. The company says it has begun producing medical isotopes, turning zinc into radioactive copper isotopes for cancer diagnostics and therapy. It plans to double power density monthly, targeting a 1 cm target with a trillion neutrons per second for years. The team of 28 cites capabilities built since 2023, including molten lithium handling and neutronics modeling, and says MIT's Dennis Whyte called the isotope-separation challenge exceptionally hard.

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