A New Approach to "Cold Fusion" / LENR from the Ukraine

From out of the Ukraine in Eastern Europe comes Professor Boris Bolotov and his engineer Waldemar Mordkovitch with a very different approach to fusion. Its still table top in size, runs at low, for fusion standards to date, quite cool temperatures and is reported to make electricity directly skipping over the heat step for power generation. The new fusion candidate uses the transmutation of zirconium, in zirconium oxide form on to other elements to produce energy.

For the demonstration the table top sized cold fusion reactor was pulsed with a nanosecond pulse generator. The pulses of electricity went into the cell filled with a “liquid metal.” This produced a kind of electrical arc in the liquid metal. During the demonstration reports have it that one hundred watts of power input produced three hundred watts of pure electrical output plus excess heat. _NewEnergyandFuel

Bolotov's work appears to be based on earlier Russian research which documented methods to transmute various elements. The Bolotov transmutation method apparently releases some potentially dangerous radiation, which the team is working to quench. Another way in which the zirconium transmutation of Bolotov differs from the nickel transmutation of Rossi, is that the Bolotov approach produces electricity directly -- without the need to produce heat energy as an intermediary.

More at PESN (via New Energy and Fuel)

In other fusion news, Brian Wang looks at research indicating that proton-Boron aneutronic fusion may be more feasible than previously thought.