It’s a low-energy reaction, so they’re going to have to figure out how to speed it up if they’re going to make power.
It is only "low energy" compared to other nuclear reactions or fusion. It is plenty high enough to produce lots and lots of power compared to burning coal, oil, or gas.
Yes and no. The reaction itself is NOT low energy (24+MEV/nucleon formed--for the PD/D2 case). Getting more nucleons to react CONTROLLABLY is what is needed, and the tech is just getting to that point. But for the very small reactors used, the "energy density" is greater than that for a fission reactor.
Yes, but that's not the important thing, IMHO.
The important thing is repeatable evidence that nuclear reactions can be catalyzed by surface effects on a material substrate. This is what Pons and Fleischmann were claiming as the explanation for "cold fusion." Their claims were challenged by the traditional nuclear physics world, which rose up as one to deride their claims a poppycock.
P&F were electrochemists, and if their results were accepted, it would jeopardize multiple billions of annual dollars being spent to keep the nuclear physics world on the government gravy train.
These results appear - to my layman's eye anyway - that something nuclear is going on at the surface level, and the mere possibility of that is exactly what the established scientific community - led by MIT - attacked with all their might back in 1989. I remember it very clearly because I was in graduate school in the spring and fall of 1989, and I remember hearing that members of the Physics Department at the institution I was attending had been directly lobbied to get with the program and attack P&F, which they did.
One of the individuals involved passed away in January 2012; I attended his funeral. The topic of his involvement in the P&F matter was part of his professional epitaph, delivered by a close colleague, and was discussed energetically at the funeral reception he was buried.