Appreciate the well-informed reply, LG. That’s the sort of response that makes these kinds of threads informative and interesting to us laymen.
Ditto to Gandalf the Gray’s response.
Maybe you don’t know, but the whole idea behind cold fusion is that heat or pressure is not required.
The idea is that materials like palladium trap and hold the hydrogen atoms closer than what their electrical charge would normally allow. Then when the material gets electrically excited, whammo, the protons spontaneously join together, creating radiation, which translates to heat, just like in a normal nuclear reactor.
Theoretically cold fusion is possible, but let me explain the problem. Take two really strong magnets and try to push the same poles together so that they touch. Tough but doable that is the EM force. Now envision putting two magnets a billion times smaller and a billion times more powerful together. With electrical forces it is a bit like trying to stop a shotgun blast by putting a kleenex over the end of the barrel. Maybe if the kleenex was made out of spectra? LOL