When I was in high school, Ponns and Fleishman announced their infamous Cold Fusion results which appeared to show that fusion was possble using relatively cheap and simple technology, at room temperatures, on a tabletop. The world went wild. "The biggest scientific news in a generation!" "Cheap energy for all!" "The end of the Oil monopolies!" As a high school student fascinated with physics, it could not come at a better time. I read everything I could find on the subject, and even was thinking about how I could try and reproduce the experiment. And then came the bad news. The results could NOT be replicated... and there were even signals that the original results may have been tweaked to look more promising than they were. Cold fusion was debunked, and few reputable scientists could get funding to investigate further.
Since then, the "hot fusion" scientists working with high-energy plasmas have still not managed to even reach a break-even point in almost 20 years, and largely the world is looking to sunlight, wind power, ethanol, etc. to meet the growing energy appetite of a technology saturated world. It seems like Cold Fusion might still be worth looking into. It turns out the Navy never gave up hope. And they claim to have results! I hope they are right.
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