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A replication cannot be a valid attempt if the workers do not start by immersing themselves in the context in which the original protocol is established.

You lost me. This is science, not postmodernism. Experiments should be described so as to be replicable to the average worker in the field. We don't look for 'context'.

Oppenheimer, Fermi and Feynman gained perhaps the majority of their renown because of the success of the Manhattan project.

Nonsense. Feynman was a nobody after the Manhattan project. He won his fame later. Oppenheimer and Fermi are both better known for work done before or after the project.

With 15 years under their belt, the Nobel-quality researchers working on CF must surely have come up with some from of reproducible, optimized protocol by now, surely?....some sort of unambiguous demonstration that anyone can set up in his lab that will reliably and unequivocally show fusion is going on? I await the demonstration.

Even to a pre-modern cave man, all meaning is a matter of content and context. You need the context of alphabetical, grammatical, etc. knowledge to read this sentence. The sentence does not provide that information. While knowledge that can exist without the knower is the ideal of objectivity, it can only be attained when the knowledge is complete. CF is not there yet. Having a protocol on a piece of paper may be enough information for baking a cake, but experimental electrochemistry, like other specialties, has practices and techniques that are known mainly to the better students of the art. Those subtle differences in knowledge can be the difference between failure and success. Honestly, it has been a real frustration to all involved in CF that replication rates have been what they have been. A lot of that has to do with the fact that only rarely are two research teams attempting precisely the same experiment. However, researchers like Storms achieve very high success rates, and overall success rates have steadily improved, and are now quite respectable. Have you ever even tried to witness a working CF cell? Do you realize what is involved to really know that it is working?

Thomas Claytor, among his other fields of research at Los Alamos, has done a series of CF experiments spanning many years that show very high rates of reproducibility. The experiment involves analyzing the gas emitted from a palladium cathode glow discharge. If he uses platinum, he gets no tritium. If he uses palladium, he gets tritium. The trials where he does not get tritium with palladium are linked to contamination in the palladium. These are measured with scintillation and mass spectrometry simultaneously. As far as I know, no one has attempted independent replication. Interestingly, the management at LANL has expressed surprisingly little interest, after failure of the efforts to disprove his claims. The spirit of scientific inquiry is where? In the scientist, not the institution.

Dr. Melvin Miles, at the time, employed as an electrochemist for the US Naval Research Lab, was attempting replication of the Fleischmann Pons electrolytic experiment. His numerous attempts yielded no evidence of nuclear reactions. He wrote a paper and it was published in Physics Letters. Not long after publication, he discovered what he was doing wrong, and proceeded to achieve a long string of successful replications. He wrote another paper, describing his success. He could not get it published in the same journal. They wouldn't even publish his letter to the editor. There is a strong case to be made for institutional bias, based on ignorance, against any evidence to support claims for CF.

So my historical knowledge of the heroes of the Manhattan Project is flawed. If you asked a typical non-scientist what those three had in common, and you got a coherent answer, it would probably be the Manhattan Project. But, we are digressing with this trivia.