In typical hnews fashion people are ignoring the actual article and instead debating conspiracy theories about cold fusion and covid.
This is not cold fusion folks. They're bombarding with 2.5 MeV photons. If you had a material made up of particles with that average energy it'd be 29011312515 Kelvin.
I think they saw "deuterium atoms in a metal lattice" and associated that with one of the original hypotheses about cold fusion. But this fusion is anything but cold:
A metal such as erbium is “deuterated” or loaded with deuterium atoms, “deuterons,” packing the fuel a billion times denser than in magnetic confinement (tokamak) fusion reactors. In the new method, a neutron source “heats” or accelerates deuterons sufficiently such that when colliding with a neighboring deuteron it causes D-D fusion reactions.
This is not cold fusion folks. They're bombarding with 2.5 MeV photons. If you had a material made up of particles with that average energy it'd be 29011312515 Kelvin.