I've waited 20 years of so for someone to demonstrate a significant amount of cold fusion -- say an amount above the noise level of instruments. I expect to wait the rest of my life.
Well, there's a couple of ways to take that. One is that you don't know where to look for information. Try
http://www.lenr-canr.org/ Another is that you disbelieve the reports from highly credentialed people (which is not so dumb, there's plenty of highly educated people who voted for Clinton).
Of course, the initial claims were made only 15 years ago, so unless you knew Fleischmann or Pons during their pre-famous days, it only seems like 20 years.
OK, suppose you have read and understood the claims and how credible they appear to be. But anybody can lie, right? The thing about scientists is that getting caught in a lie does not automatically lead to a promotion like in politics. It is a lot more dangerous for a scientist to get caught in an act of fraud. He can't just say it was just all about sex, so quit being such a prude.
I had a lot of serious doubts about the evidence for years, but it was always obvious that either the scientists were lying (which would take a lot of coordinated effort among people competing amongst each other -- possible, but very difficult, and for what kind of gain?), were experiencing synchronous hallucinations (which, by itself would be quite a phenomenon to study), knew what they were doing, but were making honest mistakes (which is a very real possibility, but over time, with improving results, this possibility diminishes), or they were correct. I vascillated a lot before I concluded that the evidence was sufficient to believe that many of the claims exceed my ability to detect falseness, so I accept them.
I repeat again. I don't think this forum can settle the scientific issues. I do think that our soldiers who are facing some pretty bleak hours in Iraq right now would like to know that we are doing whatever we can to end the need for them to be there. One thing that might do a lot toward defusing that volatile part of the world is to eliminate our dependence on oil from that region.
I hope you live long enough and look hard enough and think well enough to challenge enough claims well enough to reach your own solid conclusions. And I hope you'll share your ideas, because that is how meaningful discourse happens.