That is a awful analogy and totally wrong. Its not the key i was taking about, its what comes out of the box once you get the key in. Aka decay and isotope products + radiation that they claim does not exist. Add a proton to a nickel atom anyway you want you get either 59Cu with a half life of 81 seconds or 61Cu with a half life of 3h. Both via beta- decay. We are ignoring the gammas that also must happen with the new proton “falling” into the strong nuclear force potential well.

Now we have 59Ni and 61Ni from the decays *not* Cu and we also have at least a pair of 500keV gammas (from the positron). Lets assume these then absorb another proton via the magic key. Again we ignore the highly validated nucleus energy levels that again would result in some gamma emissions. We get 60Cu and 62Cu respectively. Both again decay via beta- into Ni again with half lives of 23mins and 10mins so again the decay so fast we need to care about it. Also we have 2 more ~500keV gamma for each decay. Again we have 60Ni and 62Ni and we note that we have already look at the “proton” chain for 60Ni. So now lets just consider 62Ni.

The 62Ni absorbs a proton and we now have 63Cu. This is stable and we finally arrive at where the Ecat folk claim to get. Never mind they also magically produce copper in natural isotope ratios where we have just show that even with a magic key you still only get 63Cu. Also you get at least a bunch of gammas from positron-electron annihilation.

Now lets consider how much energy we get out of this. Turns out this is easy to calculate. We just get the mass difference between 63Cu and either 58Ni+5p or 60Ni+3p. Using the data from http://physics.nist.gov/cgi-bin/Compositions/stand_alone.pl we get ~45MeV and ~25MeV of energy out of each reaction. We also get 6 to 10 ~500keV gammas for each. So we can now calculate the lower bound of radiation from 1 MW of thermal power. We assume only 60Ni since this results in the most energy per proton and per decay. Thus we need 250×10^15 60Ni+3p->63Cu reactions per second for this power and thus about 1.5×10^18 500keV gammas carrying about 120kW of energy. Considering that a 1-2Gy (1J/kg) dose of radiation is a very large dose will have you vomiting in a few hours. Without massive shielding any person within100 meters is going to have a really really bad day.

It should be pointed out that this is a bit of a conservative estimate. We need to consider that the half life for the products are in mins and hours, so that the true starting rate will need to be higher. Then you also have the “can’t turn off” feature of a plain old nuke plant. Since there are decays for hours after the thing is turned off, there will be high heat and radiation levels for hours afterward.

All this with a magical “fuse hydrogen with Nickel” key. The key cannot change what is in the box.

I won’t bother with just how magical this key thing is or how much other H+Ni experiments would have observed very different results (there is a lot!).

In God we trust. The rest of you show me the data!

Edit: the gamma rays are out by a factor of 2. They are approximately 500keV not 250keV as in the original post.