Quoted to have at the time achieved 3.4 x 10^14 J/kg, this technology, by the description given, looks like it has its roots directly in the work of Ken Shoulders.
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Process
The clusters are created by first bubbling helium gas through heavy water to create a helium/heavy water vapor, Beuhler said, then ionizing some of the heavy water molecules by firing an electric arc through the vapor, and finally spraying the vapor through a tiny nozzle into a vacuum chamber.
As the spray comes through the nozzle, the ions serve as seeds around which the clusters grow. By controlling the vapor pressure, the nozzle size, and the arc conditions, Beuhler said, the team can determine the size of the clusters to within 10%.
The clusters were accelerated to energies between 200 and 325 keV, which meant they were traveling at speeds of about 100 kilometers per second when they hit the target.
The apparatus created about 10 billion cluster impacts each second, resulting in several fusions each second.
NOTE: Arc discharge will form Charge Clusters which will entrain ions, these can be accelerated to a target with easily achievable potentials because the Charge Cluster shields the mass and inertia of the captured ions
The article concludes
“If the discovery leads to practical fusion power, the credit should go to funding basic research, Friedman said. "The chemical sciences people at DOE have been willing to support a few people who are way out in left field for a long time," he said, including himself and his colleagues among those out in left field."