I do not want to make too big a deal about this, by the way. I think "thermonuclear" is technically inaccurate in this context but broadly speaking, taken to mean "conventional, known, plasma fusion reactions" then Steve is right. This hypothesis has dogged the field. I do not think Fleischmann and Pons proposed that hypothesis but someone reading their first paper might have gotten that impression.
As I said, I wish they had inserted the caveat Pons introduced a few months later, in his testimony. They had been thinking about this subject for a long time and they are not fools, so I am sure they knew long before they published that this cannot be a normal fusion reaction. Charles Beaudette told me that the paper was written in haste. Perhaps it was the best they could do in a short time. There were a number of sloppy errors corrected in the next issue of the journal so evidently it was written in a hurry. I do not recall why. Perhaps to ensure priority because of the showdown with Steve Jones. Regarding the hypothesis that extreme pressure causes the reaction, that is discussed in the Congressional testimony referenced above, and in Mizuno's book. I think people still take that hypothesis seriously. It is difficult to discuss this or any other scientific subject in a congressional hearing because you have to be 100% honest and not condescending, but at the same time you cannot use the kind of detailed technical language Mizuno uses in his book, and you have to say everything in a few minutes. Pons did his best, saying: "On the next slide, we point out that if, indeed, you would try to -- if you were to try to obtain that same voltage by the compression of hydrogen gas to get that same chemical potential of .8 volts, you would have to exert a hydrostatic pressure of a billion, billion, billion atmospheres, tremendously high pressure. And, further, we see -- or the point here is that also these pressures -- or certainly these pressures, absolute hydrostatic pressures, are not attained inside the metal lattice. The dissolution of this material, these atoms going to these ions inside the lattice, represents a very high energy process, and it is not very well understood. . . ." - Jed
