Quote:
Originally Posted by Andrew H.
And I feel sorry for the handful of writers in the early 90's who used Cold Fusion devices.)
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Don't be.
Cold Fusion is in fact being studied seriously at facilities all over the world and the results, of laser-excitation cold fusion at least, indicate it is a real physical process. Whether it can be engineered into an economically viable technology is a different matter but there really is such a thing as cold fusion.
If we ever do get real cold fusion devices, though, they'll likely come decades after the first economically-viable devices produced using inertial confinement or electrostatic confinement. (Rather like ornithopters came long after fixed-wing and rotary aircraft. The physics were always real but the engineering wasn't up to the task.)
BTW, it wouldn't surprise me if cold fusion devices came *before* anybody tames magnetic-confinement plasma devices
Tokamaks and their ilk strike me very much as ornithopters--trying to do what nature does the way nature does it, instead of finnesse-ing the underlying principles.