Is it viable cold fusion or an imminent scam?

Now, is it just me, or has it been a while since we last heard about cold fusion? The last time it was brought into the limelight was when Stanley Pons and Martin Fleishmann claimed to have cracked it only to have their device questioned when scientists across the world failed to replicate their claimed results. But recently, two physicists from Italy are claiming that they not only managed to create cold fusion, but that they have a reactor ready to be sold to investors looking for a source of cheap, plentiful energy. Surprisingly, they haven’t been able to publish their results in a peer reviewed journal because their paper simply states that power is being generated by their reactor and leave it at that, and their patent for a cold fusion reactor was turned down since they neglected to explain how the device is supposed to work, which generally tends to be a requirement for a patent. Nevertheless, they’ve successfully been powering an undisclosed factory for two years with their little machine, and are ready to go to market with it, declaring that the time for scientific debates is over and the it’ll be up to their customers to decide whether the device works or not. So, how do you say “red flags” in Italian?

Let’s think about this for a second. Despite Mike Adam’s conspiracy theories regarding fusion, trying to get two atoms to combine into one is no easy feat and we’re still a long away away from viable industrial reactors despite years of sustained effort, often in the wake of budget cuts and constant nay-saying. The only place in our solar system where the kind of powerful fusion reactions we want to generate take place, is deep in the core of the Sun, at 13.6 million °C and 340 billion atmospheres. That’s roughly 6 trillion psi, the equivalent of laying on your back and balancing a typical asteroid on your chest. Yeah, that’s what it takes to overcome the Coulomb barrier and turn hydrogen into helium in the natural world, and the most promising reactor designs so far produce nearly 100 million °C while being pushed to ~150 million °C and beyond to achieve sustained fusion, to produce maybe 1.5 times the energy put into the reaction at best. And now here come two guys who not only claim that they’ve tamed fusion and can produce 31 times the power they put into the system (fusion could be considered commercially viable when it provides ten times the power it’s fed), and that they’re done all this on a tabletop and at room temperature. Wouldn’t you be a little suspicious of these claims? And would it comfort you to know that they have no idea how their creation works, why we’re not detecting any neutrons or gamma rays which should easily penetrate their shielding, and claim they’ve been using it for two years?

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