Patents are probably going to be worthless as soon as the cat is out of the bag.
A patent is the only way to make money with cold fusion. The discovery is so important, every industrial company on earth will develop it. They will leap ahead of the person or company that makes the first breakthrough, just as aviation leaped ahead of the Wrights after they went public in 1908. By 1914, airplanes were carrying multiple passengers and flying more than a thousand miles. They could never have accomplished that. And if other people had not accomplished that, their patents would not have been worth much.
It is true that many companies and even entire nations will steal the IP, but enough will pay to make a cold fusion patent worth billions. There is no other way to cash in on this breakthrough.
Look at how much trouble the Wright brothers had keeping people from simply stealing their IP.
They won every court case. They made tons of money from the patent. It was trouble, but it paid well. It is true that the effort weakened Wilbur and he died of typhoid in 1912, but sickness killed him, not the patent system.