"At the atomic level, palladium looks like a lattice and the electricity drives the deuterium to the palladium. "They sit on the surface and they pop inside the lattice," he explained, using an artist's rendition of the lattice.

"McKubre believes there is a nuclear reaction - possibly a fusion process like what happens in the sun, but occurring inside the metal, at a slower rate, and without dangerous radiation. "

Those two paragraphs, three sentences, are all the article tells us about what is happening. The experimental evidence is that sometimes you get more energy out than you put in, but it is intermittent. Even the proponents of this process can't tell us what is going on. That's really not that much to go on.

Fusion is pretty well understood at the nuclear physics level, so what is the fusion reaction suspected to be at work here? What are its products? Do any of the nuclei going in disappear, or do new ones show up after the reaction runs to completion (as you would expect if fusion were happeneing)?

I have an alternative explanation, which so far, given what we know, may explain this energy anomaly. Palladium appears to play a catalytic role in this reaction, and I do know that monatomic hydrogen, created by electric arc by disassociation from molecular hydrogen, H2, can go into solid solution in the palladium crystal lattice.

Does any of this sound familiar? H1 was seriously being considered as an oxidizer-less rocket propellant as early as the late fifties. It was abandoned as a fuel because it was too unstable. TB is familiar with this technology, we discussed it here on the Zone a few years ago, as I recall.

The fact that some palladium samples seem to support the effect better than others suggests that perhaps some of their palladium catalyst is contaminated by H1, perhaps during manufacture. If whatever happens in the reactor releases the H1 it would immediately combine to form H2, releasing an enormous amount of energy. (No violation of energy conservation here, the energy used to create H1, usually an electric arc, gets paid back by the recombining monatomic hydrogen). It could easily be mistaken for a fusion reaction, but it is entirely chemical in nature. No radiation is released, none would be detected and the original chemistry would not change at all. The same elements would remain after the reaction as before, in the same proportions, leaving no evidence except the excess heat.

I'm no elecrochemist, and electrochemists are certainly familiar with this reaction and therefore must have taken it into account. But it certainly makes more sense than a new form of fusion that is intermittent and releases no radiation and no fusion products.

I really, really hope I'm wrong.