&gt; I&#x27;ve met some &#x27;true believers&#x27; and the common element was that they believed enough to risk other people&#x27;s funds but not enough to risk their own.<p>according to wikipedia Pons and Fleischmann self-funded the experiments for several years before the announcement to the tune of $100K.<p>Anyway, giving such a great palladium&#x27;s absorption of hydrogen it would be interesting to see a grain of palladium deuteride as a target for NIF and&#x2F;or Sandia Z.  The density of the deuterium absorbed into palladium is about the density of the standard frozen DT grain used traditionally, yet with all these additional heavy palladium atoms spread around the stability of compression  would definitely be different - whether better or worse the experiment would show. Also the electrons would be in typical in-metal cloud state instead of being attached to the deuterium atoms - again the difference which may play a role (at least in lithium deuteride used in H-bomb it doesn&#x27;t make things worse :)