There are over 1000 confirmed LENR experiments that have resulted in unexplained heat above and beyond what conventional science can explain. I'm not about to list them all. Most of these have been conducted at legitimate universities and research centres. Do a search for Mizuno of Japan for some interesting reading. He uses tungsten cathodes in his research.
It's called transmutation and it also a by-product of cold fusion. This phenomenon is not new. Many researchers have claimed that tiny amounts of new metals have been produced during cold fusion experiments. However, I have never heard anyone claim to convert nickel to copper before. Again, researcher claim that transmutation is further evidence of an actual nuclear reaction. Cold Fusion is interesting for many reasons, not the least of which is the possibility of true alchemy.
True alchemy already exist, in the furnaces of stars and supernovae - after all that is how you have all the heavy elements in the world including gold and silver. You can also produce gold in nuclear reactors and particle accelerators: "The artificial production of gold is the age-old dream of the alchemists. It is possible in particle accelerators or nuclear reactors, although the production cost is currently many times the market price of gold. Since there is only one stable gold isotope, 197Au, nuclear reactions must create this isotope in order to produce usable gold." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synthesis_of_precious_metals LENR is just another term for cold fusion; there is not much difference between Low Energy and Low Temperature: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LENR
Read this article - http://www.economist.com/node/13361472 "The hydra was eventually slain by Heracles (or Hercules, as he was known to the Romans). He did it by cauterising the monster’s severed necks to prevent regrowth before removing its final head with his bare hands because no weapon could do it. While many physicists would like to perform a similar trick on cold fusion, two decades on, the creature is proving surprisingly resilient." It looks like maybe 150 people in the world really want cold fusion/free energy. All the rest of the planets citizens do NOT WANT IT. Some are deadly afraid of it. Of course cold fusion means immediate end of the banking system, Fed, oil cartel and the Ruling Elite. The underlying physics behind it are perfectly solid. E= mc2 , do you have any idea how much energy can be created from a VERY little mass? X speed of light to the power of 2!
I don't recall seeing a cost factor in THE equation. And I remind you, when the idea of nuclear fission generated electricity was first proposed, they said it would be so cheap that electric meters would not be necessary. There is a mighty gap between the lab and scaling up for production.
However, a small community of researches continues to investigate cold fusion[7][9][10][11] claiming to replicate Fleishmann and Pons' results including nuclear reaction byproducts.[12][13] These claims are largely disbelieved in the mainstream scientific community from wiki
I have an avid interest in cold fusion, but even I see big problems with the potential to scale cold fusion. The cold fusion process usually destroys the cathode. So reactions are not sustained. In other words, the cathode needs to be considered essentially as part of fuel source. Using the example cited in the above article, the reaction consumes nickel which cost $5.50 per pound and produces copper and energy. Copper is $4.50 a pound. So you lose $1 per pound on every pound consumed. So you need to produce more than $1 worth of energy to break even. If a pound of nickel produces $1000 worth of energy, then great. We will have cheap energy and a worldwide shortage of nickel. if it only produces 70c worth of energy, we are back where we started. Runningbear