Hydrogen and deuterium nuclei are grossly different in their physical and magnetic properties. The deuterium nucleus is a boson - and as an polarized atom, it has a magnetic field due to single electron which is equivalent to 12.5 Tesla, yet as a molecule, it becomes diamagnetic.
Hydrogen/deuterium exchange is a chemical reaction where hydrogen atom is replaced by a deuterium atom with thermal gain. However, it has long been suspected that H/D exchange produces anomalous energy. Both hydrogen and deuterium switch magnetic properties very rapidly and are highly mobile. This physical parameters probably figure into putative thermal gain in some way. Here is Olga Dmitriyeva's Thesis on the subject is fairly conservative ... http://ecee.colorado.edu/~moddel/QEL/Papers/DmitriyevaThesis12.pdf Peter Hagelstein filed for a patent (pending) on a way to use this reaction for thermal gain: US 20090086877 "Methods and apparatus for energy conversion using materials comprising molecular deuterium and molecular hydrogen-deuterium" There are a host of other papers on the LENR/CANR site on this subject. The $64 question is - does the H/D Exchange Reaction catalyze a nuclear reaction, or is there another non-nuclear, supra-chemical reaction that produces gain (ZPE related).
