Acheiving fusion is relatively easy. Anyone can build a simple tabletop device that will fuse deuterium and produce neutrons.
This may be true of cold fusion too. The problem is that no one has even come close to a sustainable, break even reaction. The loss mechanisms are such that as you put more and more energy in, almost all that energy goes to something other than fusion.
To top it off, fusion is not "clean." It makes gobs of neutrons.
Fission is here. It works. I makes plenty of power. Even the "waste" issue is a nonissue if you simply process it (forbidden by Carter.)
" This may be true of cold fusion too. The problem is that no one has even come close to a sustainable, break even reaction."
- I'm not a scientist but my closest friend from high school managed the fusion R & D unit of our largest hydro company. He later told me that fusion reactions could be made to work for a millisecond "burst" as long as the reactions were contained in huge, highly unstable magnetic field. However, because the heat produced could not be permitted to come in contact with any holding chamber, the magnetic field solution was highly unsatisfactory.
This is why I find the chemical fusion reaction idea hard to believe. The enormous heat generated by true fusion (and the reason why it would make an ideal energy source) does not seem possible to me in a mere test tube chemical reaction.