Transformative advance or cold fusion 2.0?

There’s a major story breaking out of the Department of Energy today. An article in the Financial Times reports that scientists at the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory have achieved a gain of energy in an experimental system, releasing 20% more energy than input into a system by lasers. There’s an announcement scheduled by the Department of Energy for Tuesday, presumably triggered by the news getting out in the Financial Times.

I am old enough to remember the fraud of cold fusion claims in the 1980s.  At the time scientists in Utah let out news that they had achieved fusion at room temperature.  My father, a chemist, thought it was nonsense. He and thousands of others attempted to reproduce the findings to no avail.  The original results involved experimental…