The cold fusion horizon

There was some sort of plan in the works to have a model undergo a 30 day examination at a major European university. But (surprise surprise) there's no information to suggest that ever happened.

Another experimenter tried to replicate the device from the patent without success. http://peswiki.com/index.php/Directory:Muammer_Yildiz_Magnet...

Yildiz got involved in some sort of legal dust-up in Germany: http://pesn.com/2013/01/09/9602262_Yildiz_Tells_the_Story_Ab...

As of May 2015 they were said to be preparing a "sales launch" and licensing distributors: http://pesn.com//2015/05/05/9602616_Yildiz-preparing-for-sal...

More importantly, these things are physics rather than chemistry. No amount of chemistry will produce muons from ordinary chemicals, you have to use high-energy radiation. (Admittedly molecular bonds distort electron orbitals a little bit, but nothing like the factor of 200 you get from switching them for muons). If someone had a way to catalyse any kind of nuclear process with chemistry (something as simple as making a radioactive element decay faster) that would be a major breakthrough. To jump straight to the single most useful one would be too much to hope for.

Since when is a journal under obligation to review or accept a publication?

They're free to publish it on their own website.

> I wish I could remember the name of the physicist whose career was destroyed for no more than being publicly seen to entertain the possibility that cold fusion could be real.

Well, history will vindicate him if it is real. That's the way these things go and cold fusion is not an exception to this. Any kind of very much off the beaten path scientific idea that turns out to be true after all has gone the same route. There are even cases of Nobel prizes being awarded many years after the original discovery.

One thing I do know about cold fusion: nobody to date has been able to demonstrate beyond doubt the production of a net energy surplus over an extended period.

And since evidence would be very easy to provide we don't need to rely on rumors for this, just show the device and we'll call it the breakthrough that it is. And I'm sure that even nature would be more than happy to publish the write-up in that case.

You can't qualify "theoretically impossible" with "currently", because that concedes the point. Honest theorists don't say something is "impossible" unless it is known to be impossible, period; not just "our current theories can't explain it", but "our current theories, in regimes where they are well confirmed experimentally, contradict it".

For example, the scam about a "water-fueled engine" is theoretically impossible--it's not just that our current theories of chemistry can't explain how such a thing would work; it's that our current theories of chemistry can explain, in detail, why such a thing cannot work, based on a huge body of experimental knowledge about chemical reactions involving water.

That is not the case with cold fusion. Our current theories can't explain how it would work, but they also can't rule it out. The regime in question is not well explored experimentally. Honest theorists don't make claims about something being "theoretically impossible" if the regime in question is not well explored experimentally. They may say it is "theoretically extremely unlikely", but that's an opinion based on someone's judgment about how likely it is that something new will turn up in this experimental regime that our current theories don't cover. It's not the same as "impossible".