If it's legit, needless to say, it's a massive paradigm shift in energy.
Well, as far as I can tell, the hard part is accepting that 14,700 figure.
The only thing Rossi did was come up with something that made the effect easier to replicate.
Jing-tang He
• Nuclear fusion inside condense matters
• Frontiers of Physics in China
Volume 2, Number 1, 96-102, DOI: 10.1007/s11467-007-0005-8
This article describes in detail the nuclear fusion inside condense matters—the Fleischmann-Pons effect, the reproducibility of cold fusions, self-consistency of cold fusions and the possible applications
http://www.boliven.com/publication/10.1007~s11467-007-0005-8?q=(%22David%20J.%20Nagel%22)
Scientific American
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=when-scientists-sin
1. Jed Rothwell
11:52 AM 6/20/10
Shermer says that Goodstein concluded that cold fusion was most likely a case of scientists who “convince themselves that they are in the possession of knowledge that does not in fact exist.”
Cold fusion has been replicated in over 180 major laboratories, by roughly 1,500 professional scientists. These replications have been published in roughly 800 papers in mainstream, peer reviewed journals such as J. Electroanal. Chem. and Japanese J. of Applied Physcis. J. He of the Institute of High Energy Physics, Chinese Academy of Sciences estimates that the effect has been observed in roughly 14,000 experimental runs (Front. Phys. China (2007) 1: 96 102).
Many of the results were at low signal to noise ratio, but others were high, such as heat from 10 to 100 W, and tritium at 50 times background (Los Alamos, Texas A&M) up to several million times (BARC).
Most of the researchers who have reported positive results are senior, distinguished experts, such as the Chairman of the Atomic Energy Commission, government of India, and the experts at Los Alamos in charge of the Tritium Systems Test Assembly and the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at Princton. Only senior researchers can get funding because of academic politics.
When a result has been widely replicated at high signal to noise ratios and reported in the literature, that result is real, by definition. There is no other standard of reality in science. If it were possible for hundreds of scientists in hundreds of laboratories to be wrong, the experimental method would not work, and no result would be meaningful, and science itself would not work. If Shermer and Goodstein would substitute some other standard of truth, and ignore replication and peer-review, they are engaged in some form of faith-based religion or a popularity contest, not science.