Historical research guide · 0678 · 2020

Review of permeation-induced nuclear transmutation reactions

Yasuhiro Iwamura

In one minute

Yasuhiro Iwamura has spent two decades on one experiment. Build a thin film out of alternating nanometre layers of palladium and calcium oxide, put a chosen element on its surface, push deuterium gas through the film, and watch that element turn into a different element. This chapter, written for Jean-Paul Biberian’s 2020 Elsevier collection on condensed matter nuclear science, is Iwamura’s own review of that line of work, and its three load-bearing sentences are unusually plain. Low-energy nuclear transmutation reactions have been observed in the nanostructured palladium and calcium-oxide multilayer film, induced by deuterium gas permeation through it. The phenomenon has been successfully replicated by independent researchers — the sentence that matters most on this site, because reproduction by another group is what moves a result up the ladder. And Iwamura names the payoff he is aiming at: an innovative transmutation method for detoxifying radioactive nuclear waste. The chapter itself is closed access, so this page carries the citation, the summary and the claims, and sends you to the source.

Connection

Chapter twelve is about persuading nuclei to do something new inside a metal lattice rather than inside a hot plasma, and permeation-induced transmutation is the branch of that work with the longest continuous experimental record and the clearest replication story. It also points at an application the rest of the chapter does not have — turning long-lived radioactive waste into something shorter-lived — which is the kind of near-term result that would settle the argument fastest.

From the source

Low-energy nuclear transmutation reactions have been observed in a nanostructured multilayer thin film of palladium and calcium oxide.Chapter abstract, first sentence
The reactions are induced by deuterium gas permeation through the film — the driving condition is deuterium flowing through the layered structure, and the structure itself, palladium interleaved with calcium oxide at nanometre scale, is part of the claim rather than a detail of the apparatus.Chapter abstract, first sentence, second clause
The phenomenon was successfully replicated by independent researchers.Chapter abstract, second sentence
It would be used as an innovative transmutation method for detoxifying radioactive nuclear waste.Chapter abstract, third sentence

The way in

https://doi.org/10.1016/b978-0-12-815944-6.00011-7

Historical source-access record. This guide links to the original; it does not reproduce the paper text.

SOURCE NOT REACHED IN FULL. The chapter is chapter 11, pages 191 to 204, of Cold Fusion: Advances in Condensed Matter Nuclear Science, edited by Jean-Paul Biberian and published by Elsevier in 2020, ISBN 978-0-12-815944-6. It is closed access and carries no Creative Commons statement; OpenAlex and Unpaywall both return closed with no repository copy, Elsevier serves the chapter page under a text-and-data-mining reservation rather than the text, and no author copy was found in the LENR-CANR library — all checked 2026-09-08. No text of the chapter is reproduced here. The summary and the claims are written from the publisher’s own chapter abstract, which is carried in full by the Semantic Scholar record for this DOI, and the locators cite that abstract sentence by sentence. Because the abstract is three sentences long, this sheet carries four claims rather than six, and it makes no claim about the chapter’s contents beyond them. COMPANION READING. The underlying experiment has its own sheet in this library, written from the authors’ full manuscript: Iwamura and colleagues, Observation of nuclear transmutation reactions induced by D2 gas permeation through Pd complexes, at /library/stm-3cf0530104.

How to cite it

Yasuhiro Iwamura (2020) Review of permeation-induced nuclear transmutation reactions doi:10.1016/b978-0-12-815944-6.00011-7

Where it sits in the curriculum

Lattice confinement fusion