[GraceG]

What about taking a pourous ceramic element and vapor depositing nickel onto/into it?

You could make the pourus cereamic electrode with a heating element in it like Nicrome wire inside of it, then put inthe hydrogen gas and heat it up and then turn off the elecment when the reaction becomes self sustaining.

[Cboldt]

A highly porous object can be made directly from the powder, without a need to vapor deposit it on a substrate. Porous Metal Design Guidebook Section 1 (about 700 kb pdf file)

[Wonder Warthog]

"You could make the pourus cereamic electrode with a heating element in it like Nicrome wire inside of it, then put inthe hydrogen gas and heat it up and then turn off the elecment when the reaction becomes self sustaining."

This is pretty much what Schwartz's "NANOR" is. Except that he is formulating his reactant as fully dispersed nanoparticles in a ZrO2 (ceramic) matrix. He calls the ZrO2 a "buffer" that helps dissipate/spread the heat released in the nanoparticles. He has used both Palladium and Nickel in ZrO2 (and I think he is now looking at mixtures of Pd and Ni).

[Kevmo]

That sounds very close to what Dr. Arata and then Dr. Hagelstein have been doing. As far as I can tell, the porosity increases the surface area of the reactive element...