On January 24, 2005, at around 4:00 p.m., an explosion rocked a cold fusion laboratory at Hokkaido University, Japan. The experimental design was the plasma electrolysis method, one of several methods used to perform cold fusion experiments. Physicist Tadahiko Mizuno, one of Japan's most experienced cold fusion scientists and a guest of his were in the laboratory at the time of the explosion. Mizuno and the guest suffered wounds to the face, neck, arms and chest from shards of glass. A large piece of glass next to Mizuno's carotid artery was safely removed.
A definitive explanation is unknown, though Mizuno suspects that a mixture of hydrogen and oxygen in the headspace of the cell was ignited. Mizuno has performed these experiments hundreds of times, and this apparatus had been well-tested over the last five years. Before the experiment, Mizuno had checked all of his equipment and had made sure that the exhaust tube was clear. "The outlet tube leading to the mass spectrometer was definitely not blocked or impeded, so the gas in the headspace was at one atmosphere," he reported. A high-pressure build-up of hydrogen and oxygen has been ruled out.
The big question on everyone's minds is whether this was a chemical explosion - or a nuclear explosion. A physicist who considered the amount of energy required to convey the 800cc of electrolyte a distance of up to 6 meters, was unconvinced that this was a chemical reaction.
For those of you not familiar with cold fusion research, most is performed by chemists who take extreme care not to have lab explosions. Most research occurs in Japan, Italy, and probably China. In the USA most research is done in military labs. Similar unexplained explosions have occured in the past. The topic is extremely politicized, not least because it potentially wrecks the careers of thousands of hot fusion researchers.
The research that gets publicized is oriented towards power sources, but it has occured to me that potentially it could be used as a weapon. Bear in mind that cold fusion is relatively cheap and easy to do and a number of researchers run experiments in their garages. It's something that bears watching as a fusion bomb that you could build in your basement would be a jihadi's wet dream.