>>12465731Not really, no.
The only cheap nuclear reaction available at our technology level is adding a neutron, which simply moves you to a different isotope, and then you wait for it to decay. Starting with mercury, all higher isotopes decay into thallium; only 196 gets you gold.
You can also do the same thing with platinum-196, which decays into stable gold after turning into 197; this might actually be cheaper, since platinum-196 is more abundant so you can maybe even avoid isotope purification. Of course, platinum is more expensive as gold, but not as expensive as pure mercury-196.
There are other reactions that can be done with platinum. One of the more interesting ones includes blasting deuterium-loaded platinum sponge with several MeV of cyclotron-produced high energy gamma rays to get lattice-confinement fusion. This has been recently tried with a palladium alloy, but it might work with platinum. The process is more expensive than neutron irradiation.
Starting from iridium, you can use a helium beam to get (alpha, n) reactions, where you gain two protons and one neutron to create gold. You will only get short-lived isotopes, with half-lives of several days; sell fast, before it decays into platinum. Also, iridium is not cheap.
You can also try to extract gold from uranium fission fragments, but I there will be very few of them, since gold is so close to lead, which is super-stable.
There is also a possiblity of forcefully fusing different atoms using accelerators; that is how most new elements were discovered. This is extremely expensive, and only useful for getting single atoms of the stuff.
