Is cold fusion really possible? Nuclear Chemistry at Work Read more from Chapter Nuclear Chemistry

In the late 1980s, reports surfaced of experimentally realized cold fusion, exciting the scientific community. It turned out, however, that these reports were false, and nobody was able to reproduce the results of what were initially reported as relatively simple experiments. Since these experiments were disproved, other credible reports of cold fusion experiments have indeed surfaced, and thus it does appear that cold fusion is possible in principle. Unfortunately, the energy released from the few successful experiments has been much smaller than the amount of energy needed to actually run the experiments, making the feasibility of cold fusion as a source of energy production unlikely. Compared to the initial burst of interest, mainstream scientists have generally lost interest in the topic, though there remains a group of fringe experimentalists who still seek to make cold fusion for energy production a reality. If such experiments could work, they would certainly be of great interest to the scientific community, but today most believe that it just isn’t possible to generate enough energy from cold fusion sources to make it a viable source of energy production.