Well, conversion of lead into gold is back on the table!  Turns out all you need is a Large Hadron Collider and a massive energy source but it's probably going to be a while before this is a viable alternative to gold mining.

ALICE detects the conversion of lead into gold at the LHC

"Near-miss collisions between high-energy lead nuclei at the LHC generate intense electromagnetic fields that can knock out protons and transform lead into fleeting quantities of gold nuclei"

https://www.home.cern/news/news/physics/alice-detects-conversion-lead-gold-lhc
"...The electromagnetic field emanating from a lead nucleus is particularly strong because the nucleus contains 82 protons, each carrying one elementary charge. Moreover, the very high speed at which lead nuclei travel in the LHC (corresponding to 99.999993% of the speed of light) causes the electromagnetic field lines to be squashed into a thin pancake, transverse to the direction of motion, producing a short-lived pulse of photons. Often, this triggers a process called electromagnetic dissociation, whereby a photon interacting with a nucleus can excite oscillations of its internal structure, resulting in the ejection of small numbers of neutrons and protons. To create gold (a nucleus containing 79 protons), three protons must be removed from a lead nucleus in the LHC beams..."



image from CERN