Historical research guide · 0891 · 2017

Nickel-hydrogen reactors: heat generation, isotopic and elemental composition of fuel

Alexander G. Parkhomov · Sergey N. Zabavin · Timur R. Timerbulatov · Kirill A. Alabin · Stepan N. Andreev · Alexander G. Sobolev

In one minute

Alexander Parkhomov’s Moscow laboratory has been building nickel-hydrogen heat generators in the style of Andrea Rossi’s reactor, and this paper is the accounting of what came out of four of them. The reactors — AP2, Protok-6, VV3 and KB3 — ran on about a gram of nickel powder with lithium aluminium hydride, at eleven to twelve hundred degrees, and delivered between 100 and 790 megajoules of heat beyond the electricity they drew. The team then took the spent fuel, the ceramic around it, and the powder that collected in the reactor cavity to five separate laboratories for isotope and element analysis. Their headline finding is careful and deliberately unglamorous: the nickel and lithium isotope ratios did not shift reliably. What did change was everything else — boron, tungsten, cerium and dozens of other nuclides appeared in quantities far above what the starting materials held. Parkhomov and his co-authors set out how much energy a run must produce before an isotope shift could be seen at all.

Connection

Chapter twelve is about getting nuclei to react inside a metal lattice, and this is the measurement discipline that question needs: not just a heat number, but the fuel taken apart afterwards in five laboratories. It belongs to chapter one as well, because Parkhomov states plainly what energy yield a run must reach before an isotopic change could even be detected — the kind of threshold that separates a real null result from a missed one.

From the source

Four nickel-hydrogen reactors of different designs, fuelled with about a gram of nickel powder plus lithium aluminium hydride and run at eleven to twelve hundred degrees Celsius, produced between 100 and 790 megajoules of heat in excess of the electrical energy consumed.Sects. 6–9; Sect. 11, conclusion 1
In the Protok-6 reactor, measured with a flow-through water calorimeter, excess power of about 30 watts appeared once the temperature reached 1150 degrees Celsius, rose without intervention to 50–60 watts five days later, and totalled roughly 100 megajoules over the run.Sect. 7, Figs. 9 and 10
The authors set the detection threshold explicitly: nuclides absent from the starting fuel become detectable at an excess energy of about one megajoule per gram of fuel, while a reliable shift in the isotope ratios of elements already present requires more than one hundred megajoules per gram — the figure reported for Rossi’s high-temperature generator being about 5800 megajoules per gram.Sect. 5, including reaction (1) and the paragraphs following it
No significant change in the isotopic composition of nickel or lithium was found, with one exception: an ICP-MS analysis of AP2 fuel at Uppsala University showed the relative content of lithium-6 more than doubling and noticeable shifts in the nickel ratios, a result that differs from the analysis of the same reactor at the Vernadsky Institute in Moscow.Sect. 6, Table 3 and the closing paragraphs; Sect. 11, conclusion 2
Impurity nuclides increased sharply not only in the fuel but in the ceramic and structural parts next to the active zone — boron above all, along with nuclides of atomic mass 43–53, 64–83, 107–130 and 198–208; in the powder collected between the VV3 tubes, cerium-140 reached 6.3 per cent against under 0.0001 per cent in the starting fuel.Sect. 8, Tables 6 and 7; Sect. 10; Sect. 11, conclusions 3 and 4
About 20 milligrams of copper appeared in the KB3 fuel, 0.84 per cent copper-63 and 0.42 per cent copper-65; the authors note that forming it by nickel plus hydrogen would release roughly 200 megajoules against the reactor’s 400 megajoule excess, while stating that the matching depletion of nickel-62 and nickel-64 lies within measurement error and was not observed.Sect. 10, reactions (3) and (4) and the paragraphs following; Table 8

The way in

https://doi.org/10.17725/rensit.2017.09.074

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

Licence checked directly in the article and at the publisher. The English-language version of record, RENSIT 2017, 9(1):74-93, is free to read at en.rensit.ru and Unpaywall records it as gold open access, but no Creative Commons statement appears in the article, on the journal’s pages or in the fetched text — checked on 2026-09-08. So this sheet carries the summary, the claims and the authors’ own abstract and sends the reader to the source. The claims below were written from the complete published article and the locators use its own numbered sections, tables and figures. The library record’s title was reproduced from the journal in capitals and is given here in ordinary case; the registry’s author list was also truncated, and the full six-author list is restored above. Parkhomov, Zabavin and Timerbulatov work at the experimental-design laboratory K.I.T. in Moscow, Alabin and Andreev at the Prokhorov General Physics Institute of the Russian Academy of Sciences, Sobolev at the Lebedev Physical Institute. The companion sheet in this library is Parkhomov and Belousova’s earlier report of the reactors themselves, Research into Heat Generators Similar to High-temperature Rossi Reactor, J. Condensed Matter Nucl. Sci. 19 (2016) 244–256, at /library/stm-f4ba1e1490; the device all of this work is modelled on is Andrea Rossi’s granted patent, at /library/stm-a3bb55612e.

How to cite it

Alexander G. Parkhomov, Sergey N. Zabavin, Timur R. Timerbulatov, Kirill A. Alabin, Stepan N. Andreev, Alexander G. Sobolev (2017) Nickel-hydrogen reactors: heat generation, isotopic and elemental composition of fuel doi:10.17725/rensit.2017.09.074

Where it sits in the curriculum

Lattice confinement fusion