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Cold fusion eventually being demonstrated wouldn't surprise me, since it's not terribly hard to create fusion in relatively mild environments such as a fusor. What's difficult is getting more energy out of it than you put in to generate the reaction.

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I'm not an expert but my impression was that a fusor isn't cold fusion at all. The device itself does not heat up too much perhaps, but it literally accelerates ions to fusion temperatures of >45 million Kelvin.

It's a partly a problem of semantics, really. You can't really say it's a fusor runs at >45K because you're not in thermodynamic eq. (and therefore, there is no T).

Likewise a laser runs at "negative" T, but which is hotter than infinity T (pop inversion happens at T<0). There's no contradiction because T is again defined in eq., so we're just abusing terms.

So if we got net energy out of a fusor it would, for all practical purposes, be "cold" fusion. In fact, it doesn't have a T at all ;)

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