I agree with Günter here, with one proviso. If you very clever to start out with, do your homework perfectly, take adequate precautions and have lots of Lab experience - then you might get lucky even on a low budget, if everything were to go perfectly. In retrospect, once all is known, this will probably be fairly easy (except for obtaining the correct nanopowder). Hindsight is 20/20, as they say.
For instance – an interesting book is out (but not available in English AFAIK). Experts in the USA had assumed the Nazi effort to build an A-bomb was way behind us, since they could not put adequate resources into it at the time - and this cannot be done cheaply. Then a historian named Karlsch made the claim that the SS almost got lucky, on a pittance … http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/print/22270 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hitlers_Bombe This means absolutely nothing, and Karlsch was most likely wrong on many details - plus it would have been a ‘dirty bomb’ anyway – except to say that very daunting tasks often have an easy solution, in retrospect. Maybe I should find a better example of that premise, anyway :-) However, back to Ni-H - there is one commercially available 10 nm nanopowder which is known to work. It is expansive. Brad Lowe of ecatbuilders has gotten hold of some (and I see you have posted to that forum) so why not wait to see what his results are? Otherwise, I put your chances at almost zero on a minimal budget - unless you can get hold of the proper nanopowder, which is known to work and go from there. Brad has the least expensive possible setup, and it is a simple comparison test of two identical reactors, with-and-without - but if he gets lucky with this, then so could you. Let me say that this R&D is very dangerous, involves toxic materials and explosive gases, and myself nor anyone on this forum are responsible in any way for personal or financial injuries or losses. You assume the complete risk for this. There have been three deaths which I am aware of – two experimenters with hydrogen (HHO) in Southern California and one at SRI in cold fusion. Forewarned is forearmed. From: Günter Wildgruber Jojo, Just an educated guess from someone peripherally related to the field. Which means, that, because there is no agreed theory, You have to rely to a lot of trial and error and educated guesses. If You do'nt have a good basic environment >>100k$, and have no colleagues for brainstorming, You do not stand a chance of doing something substantial. I actually am in an environment to hypothetically do this, but I don’t. It starts with the funding. We have other things to do, albeit we would have lets say 80% of the infrastructure and knowledge to do something like that. What is missing, is an educated guess --a basic workable theory- which gives preliminary results in the first place. This is a very strange field indeed. Krivit summed it up quite convincingly, to my opinion. http://newenergytimes.com/v2/sr/McKubreM4/McKubre-Experiment-M4.shtml If you place your bet on Ni-H, feel free to do that. Any other reactions do not have any societal/commercial value anyhow. Then you have to place Your bets on LENR, against 'cold fusion', in Krivits sense. Next You have to cultivate Your intuition: How should the reactive nickel-surface look like? 100nm? 5um? This seems to be the range. Look at what is possible. One has to have an extremely good intuition, how to choose the right parameters in say 10 dimensions. Does Rossi have it? Defkalion? We do not know.
