I wanted to bring an idea to the concept of cold fusion. With my undestanding, It takes up alot more power to create power with cold fusion than any amount of power we can currently get from it.I believe that it is not in the right temperature environment for the nucleous to gain any mass. They have tried heating the two atoms to fuse creating a nucleous strong enough to get the right results. Wouldn't it make sense to create a happy medium when fusing the two atoms?My idea is that they should create two seperate distinguishing environments at both extreme cold and extreme hot. If you put both of the atoms in the center then they might attract rather than seperate from each other.Therefore creating a constant environment in the epicenter of both extreme conditions.Then again what do I know anyways :)

It is about time cold fusion is being recognised. The active disavowment of this technology by MIT and the DOE for oil economy reasons is nothing short of the crime of the century. The people who were involved in hoodwinking the general public should be held accountable.

The greatest threat to the United States is not terrorism. It is global warming a direct result of the oil economy.

As the world sits on the brink of thermal runaway
I think the DOE simply had no other choice. The writing is on the wall for the oil industry. I can only hope we do not produce another 20 years of automotive Carbon Dioxide while waiting for commercialization of this technology.

My definition: "Cold fusion is any process in which a nuclear reaction is produced without relying on traditional means, such as particle accelerators, neutrons, cosmic rays, alpha particles or stellar temperatures."

Unfortunately the term "cold fusion" means different things to different people. It is certainly premature to define cold fusion as a practically unlimited energy resource. But that is what most people say when asked to describe CF. I suspect that many disagreements about CF would disappear if its definition were accepted by all antagonists.

The main issue today is validity of scientific claims, such as accumulation of He-4 at the rate of about one atom per 23 MeV of excess heat (reported by many teams), and not practical applications. Promissing too much too early was one of the mistakes made in 1989. I hope that the DOE will focus on science and not on applications. Applications would follow naturally after the basic claims are recognized as valid.

I am responding to my own message above. Excess heat (at the level of 1 W and less) can be due to non-nuclear causes. Most of us are not qualified to rule out possibilities of some parasitic chemical reactions (already mentioned in 1989 reports) or some electric battery effects (also mentioned by those who criticized cold fusion). That is why direct demonstrations of "nuclear signatures," such as neutrons, protons, tritons and alpha particles is much more convincing. See recent reports of Steven Jones (about neutrons and protons) or the report of Lipson (about alpha particles). These reports can be downloaded from the library at http://www.lenr-canr.org

Excess heat, if it were reproducible at the level 50 W or more, would be not only very convincing but also very promissing. I have a web site devoted to cold fusion: http://blake.montclair.edu/~kowalskil/cf/

The experiment that was done I believe involved ultrasonic sound pulsing into water which then caused flashes to occur within the chamber as atoms collided, Or was there a different method used to create the cold fussion energy release.

Harold LaValley asked about sono-fusion. As far as I know this is claimed to be hot fusion. The temperature in the center of a collapsing bubble was said to be millions of K. But I know very little about this.
Ludwik Kowalski

The process in the article is similar to electrolysis in that an electrical current is passed though the media of choice. In normal electrolysis the media is H2O where the current splits the atoms into the individual chemicals I would call this analogous to cold fission very little energy is released in the process. If one assumes that the sun and the atomic bomb are hot reactions of fusion and of fission then we probably have seen the cold version of these.
The suns fusion if scaled to the proportions to that of the bomb is probably of equal energy release. So if that is the comparison for hot then I would not expect much different from knowing that electrolysis only splits the H20 into there respective elements with no other output of energy release.
Probably changing to different media types would yield different results of high energy output.

I used to work in a power station What most interests me in the cold fusions research is that significant pressures have yet to be tried. (oh sure a few dozen psi have been, nothing though that is not done in conventional steam boilers). Why? Perhaps the researchers know they are waisting their time and government money.

The author of this story, Charles Choi of the UPI, has consulted with us for source information on the subject of cold fusion. We have an immense amount of very current information on the subject of cold fusion available for free at our website www.newenergytimes.com. As well, answers to nearly all questions a layperson or general scientist may have, are presented in our 53-page "The 2004 Cold Fusion Report."