The idea that any zany idea would become practical if only you spend enough time and money on it is just not true.
The idea of cold fusion is not so crazy. On the contrary, the main argument of the opponents of cold fusion, which consists in overcoming the Coulomb barrier exclusively with the help of extremely hot plasma, looks crazy.
PS
I found the following on Lev Verkhovsky 's website:
Pyotr Leonidovich Kapitsa (1894-1984) was an outstanding physicist and engineer, founder and director of the Institute of Physical Problems, academician since 1939. In 1978 he received the Nobel Prize for the discovery of the superfluidity of liquid helium.
Just a few days before the start of the war (June 17, 1941), he published an article in the Pravda newspaper "The UNITY OF SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY", in which he discussed the issues of the best organization of science in the country. I will give a fragment (quoted from the book by P.L. Kapitsa. "Experiment, Theory, Practice". Moscow: Nauka, 1974, p. 80):
It often seems to me that it's as if we in the scientific community are even afraid of debates and certain assessments. Maybe this is because we still consider false self-esteem based on the misconception that a good scientist cannot be mistaken, because a "mistake" should discredit him. It's as if we forget that "only the one who doesn't make mistakes doesn't do anything." After all, every scientific truth of today can be supplemented or changed tomorrow, because we are in a state of continuous approximation to the knowledge of the true nature of things. Only by overcoming error after error, revealing contradictions, we get an ever closer solution to the problem posed.
And here Peter Leonidovich gives his definition of pseudoscience:
Mistakes are not yet pseudoscience. Pseudoscience is the non—recognition of mistakes.