Prospects for the future development of cold fusion

Almost five years have passed since the first announcement of cold fusion in March of 1989. Over this period there have been, from time to time, a number of reports of the observation of excess heat and nuclear reactions. Concerning nuclear reactions, there still remains the controversial questions of fusion, which has given its name to the phenomena associated with cold fusion. In any event, so long as the reproducibility remains so poor, it is impossible to resolve such questions and the original controversy has not faded away. From the very beginning of cold fusion, it has been generally conceded among scientists that the claimed excess heat cannot be merely a result of the ordinary DD fusion. Neutron emissions ere extremely weak and sporadic, which made almost nothing of correlation measurements between excess heat and fusion reactions. Another peculiar feature of the nuclear reactions, associated with cold fusion, lies with the observation that the generation of tritium, which is concurrent with neutron emission, is none the less more than ten million times larger than that of the neutrons, and still it is not clear how this relates to the heat. Moreover there are claims that the excess heat production can be correlated to the production of helium-4 as nuclear ashes. These findings have promoted exotic theoretical models to explain cold fusion mechanisms