Basically, this isn't really what people have thought of historically as cold fusion, because you are hitting the deuterons with photons which have high enough

Basically, this isn't really what people have thought of historically as cold fusion, because you are hitting the deuterons with photons which have high enough energy that you would expect to see some neutrons anyways (and making those high energy photons costs a whole lot of energy). The big thing in the paper is that they are seeing some higher energy neutrons than you would expect to see. The 2.5 MeV neutrons are pretty normal for whacking deuterons around. The question is why they are getting 5 MeV neutrons from this reaction. I don't have time today to dig into the theory which they have which predicts the high energy neutrons. If there is a benefit from this experiment, it would be in validating the theory. Perhaps the theory could point a way toward lattices helping fusion along, in a similar way that Fleishman and Pons thought it could. However, that is a long step from this experiment, and it is possible that there is some other cause for the high energy neutrons other than the lattice screening effect.