The National Ignition Project(NIF) began construction in 1997 under the Clinton Administration.  It was (and still is) an attempt to duplicate the fusion process by which our sun produces energy.   The accepted, current, traditional approach requires the creation, containment, and manipulation of plasma (fourth state of matter) at temperatures between 100 million (NIF) and 150 million (TOKAMAK) degrees Centigrade (90,000,032 F and 270,000,032 F) and pressures 100 billion times that of earth’s atmosphere.

Creating and controlling these conditions has required a substantial amount of new technology to be invented, developed and implemented.  Constructing the project also required a substantial, long-term investment in growing and maintaining the physical and intellectual infrastructure.  Constructed at a cost of $3.5 billion dollars, the NIF currently employs a thousand people and has an annual budget of $140,000,000.   With its hardware occupying a building ten-stories high and three football fields long, this is one of the larger science experiments ever undertaken by man.  While the United States has been working on it’s approach to fusion, other nations have invested a combined $20 billion dollars on a different approach to fusion the called the TOKAMAK:

What started as a civilian project with military undertones will be transferred to military control for weapons development.
Where the TOKAMAK uses a dynamic toroidal suspension of plasma for fusion experiments the National Ignition Facility’s plan is to use successive one shot technique to generate power, not dissimilar from the model of a one-cylinder piston engine (just a lot faster).

As of April 20, 2013 the National Ignition Facility has failed to yield any ash (Helium), hasn’t been turned on past one third power, and has some significant operational problems:

$24 billion dollars invested in hot fusion research — without any demonstrable nuclear by-products or yield of energy in excess of system input.  That’s a lot of money invested no matter what the spin-off technologies produced.

Enter/re-enter a different conversation.  In 1985 two electrochemists experienced an event which burnt a hole in their concrete floor and made a general mess of their lab.  Intrigued, they invested $100k of their own money to continue their research into this phenomenon.  What they didn’t know at the time was that this anomaly had been seen before.

In 1927 Swedish scientist J. Tandberg applied for a patent, “to produce helium and useful reaction energy.”  His claim was that he had discovered a method to fuse of Hydrogen into Helium within an electrolytic cell using Palladium electrodes.  His patent was denied as he could not adequately explain the process.  Sixty-two years later (1989) at the University of Utah, Fleischmann and Pons also used Palladium as an electrode in their experiments.

Fleischmann and Pons held a press conference announcing that they had created a process which resulted in heat in excess with respect to the amount of energy that was applied to a closed system at room-temperature and pressure.  They went on to state that the experiment had produced signatures of a nuclear event including the presence of Helium, neutrons, and Tritium.  The press termed their work “cold fusion.”

At the time, Martin Fleischmann was one of the world’s most respected elecrochemists who at one time held the Farady Chair of Chemistry at the University of Southampton where he had been a professor. Stanly Pons earned is Ph.D. in Chemistry under Fleischmann.

What happened afterwards isn’t so dissimilar to what happened to van Leeuwenhoek when he announced the presence of single-celled organisms, or the refusal of the press to publish news of the Wright Brothers heavier than air flight.

What was different was the campaign to discredit their research at the highest levels of government and academia.  Eugene Mallove was originally a science writer at MIT, which published results which seriously damaged the credibility of Fleischmann and Pons research.  After seeing the original data from MIT and that which was published, Mallove resigned from his position at MIT in protest.

Eugene Mallove, controversial and outspoken critic of mainstream opinion, was murdered in 2004.

That which started out being termed cold-fusion is now referenced as a Low Energy Nuclear Reaction, Lattice Enhanced Nuclear Reaction, Muon-catalyzed fusion (μCF), Sono-fusion (fusion through cavitation), and a few other terms, all once considered fringe or junk science have been heavily published and continue to be researched.