I am interested in the Mizuno experiment but concerned that similar experiments are being called replications.
I am very concerned about this. I have no objection to people doing other experiments. If they want to try a flat plate instead of a mesh, or a ceramic reactor instead of a steel one, that's fine with me. I have heard from people who want to try those things. These other experiments are quite different from Mizuno's work. I would call them "inspired by" Mizuno's experiment, rather than "replications." I doubt these tests will work. There is a gigantic parameter space to be searched through, and most of the time, most experiments fail, so these will probably fail as well. No one will have any idea why.
All that is fine! Failed experiments are always okay. Exploring a gigantic parameter space and taking shots in the dark are fine.
HOWEVER, here is what I fear. I fear these people will then tell the world, "I did a Mizuno experiment replication and it failed, which calls into question the original experiment." No, it doesn't. It does not tell you a damn thing about the original experiment, any more than the peculiar airplanes shown here tell you something about the Wright brothers:
https://www.lenr-canr.org/acrobat/RothwellJthewrightb.pdf
Some of those airplanes were invented by smart people such as Alexander Graham Bell. They look comical to the modern eye, but I am not inclined to make fun of people for getting it wrong. However, the Wrights published a patent in 1906 telling everyone how to replicate their airplane, and Mizuno published a complete recipe last month. So if you make something quite different, that's your choice, and it is on you. Don't call it a replication. Don't ask Mizuno or me why it failed. Believe me, we will not have the slightest idea. (Okay, he will have more of an idea than I do, but a "large parameter space" means there millions of ways to do it wrong.)
With enough funding and research, the parameter space will shrink dramatically. By "enough funding" I mean a few billion dollars. An amount that will pay back every day or so for the next several hundred years if this works.