A well recognize feature of LENR is the rapid or sometimes almost instantaneous stabilization of radioactive elements.
This LENR mechanism is central to the way LENR can produce energy through an extreme range from megawatts to milliwatts. One of the toughest LENR riddles to answer is as follows: ‘how can the meltdown of a Ni/H reactor be caused by the same process that produces one watt of output in the Cravins golden ball.’ The mechanism that provides this vast range of power generation intensity is tunneling. It is clear that the application of a magnetic field can increase the rate of radioactive decay in isotopes by orders of magnitude. This same mechanism can work inside protons and neutrons to increase the production of virtual mesons. To set the stage, the three quarks inside a proton live inside a very small volume. This quantum confinement box defines the constraints imposed on the uncertainty of the trio of quarks by limiting the range in their position to a high degree. Through the uncertainty principle, this means that the variable maximum virtual energy that this fixed position produces is very large. The virtual quark inside the proton is jumping around inside its tunneling confinement box with great vigor. But the energy level to produce a meson is also high at 140 MeV. So without some help a meson is not produced by virtual particle production. But when a magnetic field is applied to the proton, it adds some kinetic energy to the quark dance. This pushes up the floor of the tunneling confinement box. The degree in which this floor is raised is proportional to the strength of the magnetic field applied to the proton. In a very strong magnetic field, the virtual meson jumps out of the confinement box very often because the floor of the box is raised very high. Many mesons are produced that eventually decay to muons that catalyze hydrogen fusion. When the magnetic field is weak as in the case of the Cravins ball, very few meson get out of the confinement box and the muon catalyzed fusion level is very small. But fusion still goes on because that small amount of extra magnetic energy is just enough to produce some small amounts of fusion.
