Is the idea instrinsically ridiculous? No, there are chemical cataylsts, it is conceivable there are nuclear cataylsts - though the forces they need to overcome are many orders of magnitude larger. But there is no evidence that anybody has ever found any. All there is, is some bad science overreporting unreproduced and merely alleged results, trying to hype a pretty lousy idea about how easy it might be to find such things, in order to scare up funding.
There papers get published, but are laughable. If such a thing exists, they haven't found it. And they never will, using methods and standards of experimental procedure that could have been taken from a perpetual motion machine patent application historical handbook. If anybody ever does find anything similar, it will be by quite different methods, and vastly higher standards, and it will be reproducible - readily, not hand waving about alleged outliers in integrated heat measurements.
Perhaps it's only meaningful to little me. I like to have authors make meaningful comparisons, even in cases where they are handling fictional matters.
If the author insists on revealing the number of times the experiments were allegedly successful, it would be nice to know the total number of times the experiments were run, rather than the hours consumed by experimentation.