BenK wrote:

"Look at yesterday's Nature article about cold fusion for a fun (and exaggerated) musing on the problems of this strategy."

I do not have a subscription so I cannot read it. But Nature's reporting on cold fusion has been highly inaccurate and biased. Last month, for example, there was a cold fusion conference in Rome, Italy, sponsored by the ENEA (the Italian National Agency for New Technologies Energy and the Environment -- like the DoE), the Italian Physical Society, the Italian Chemical Society, the National Research Council (CNR), and Energetics Technologies. There were major results announced from Italy, Japan and especially the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory (NRL). The people at the NRL did several hundred positive experiments in a row confirming the Arata method. This produces excess heat only with no input power. Another replication of it at Kobe U. was recently published in Phys. Lett. A.

So there is a lot going on in cold fusion, but you will not read one word of it in Nature, except (apparently) for ridicule.

The April 2009 CBS "60 Minutes" segment on cold fusion was a lot more scientific and accurate than Nature.

I have a collection of 1,200 papers on cold fusion which I copied from the library at Los Alamos, plus 2,500 others from proceedings and other sources. I have uploaded ~1000 papers and the news of the Italian conference and much else, here:

http://lenr-canr.org