Tabletop fusion per se is trivial:<p><a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth_fusor" rel="nofollow">http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farnsworth_fusor</a><p>Or whack a piece of palladium deuteride with a hammer.<p>Breakeven is another matter.
They missed a few things here. Cold fusion isn't thought to be impossible by anyone, just impractical enough that it may never be a legitimate source of power. How two nuclei could fuse at room temperature has been elaborated, I'd bet you could find three good theories on Wikipedia. And it wouldn't be a totally clean source of power, though the waste would become safe in a very short time relative to fission.
Articles like this illustrate the extent that the general public does not understand science. No scientific theory or observation is ever indisputably resolved and closed to debate.