Well, you're undoubtedly a better judge of your own scholarship than I. I'll grant you, however, that Science has occasionally published some pretty far out stuff.
I take it you have some nodding acquaintance with electrochemistry. If so, you should look at Pons and Fleischmanns paper: M. Fleischmann, S. Pons, "Electrochemically Induced Nuclear Fusion of Deuterium", J. Electroanal. Chem., 261, 301-308, and erratum, 263, p187 (1989). (It's transcribed several places on the Web, but I can't vouch for accuracy. Here: Pons & Fleischmann, for example.) Point is, their work was solidly based in theory. That being said, about everything after that could have made a good Keystone Kops plot.
On the basis of their studies, Pons and Fleischmann applied for a DOE grant in the late 80s. The DOE forwarded the proposal for review to Stephen Jones, who was working somewhat similar lines at BYU. Jones contacted Pons suggesting that they "collaborate," i.e., he wanted to pick their brains. Pons and Fleischmann agreed because they wanted to pick back.
Shortly after, Pons and Fleischmann, fearing that Jones was about to scoop them, went public in advance of publication of their J. Electroanal. Chem. article. (The article itself was premature; again, because they were trying to beat Jones to the gate.) Jones was furious, and went whining to his sponsers at the DOE. Meanwhile, everybody with (and some without) access to palladium and heavy water was trying to reproduce the results whether or not he had an inkling of what was going on. The DOE sent some major bucks to their pet hot fusion physicists at MIT, again to the consternation of Jones, who by this time was grinding away on his ax.
The MIT folks, who figured they already knew everything there is to know about D-D fusion, were more dismissive than skeptical. After all, fusion is always attended by lots of high-speed neutrons, and what does an electron chemist know about nuclear reactions anyway. So they came up with a bunch of experiments designed to detect the same sorts of phenomena they had been monitoring in their Tokamaks.
Well, MIT didn't see any neutrons or tritium, so they concluded that cold fusion must be bovine droppings, but they already knew that. Oh, there was some odd excess energy in some of the experiments designed to detect it, but that was explained away (actually swept under the carpet) by redefining the goals of the experiments. Anyhow, it wasn't very much of an excess. MIT's chief science writer at the time, Eugene Mallove, was so offended about this breech of science ethics that he resigned in protest.
Since then, the DOE hasn't coughed up any more cold fusion money and MIT has continued with its hot fusion work. Elsewhere, notably in Japan and Italy, but also in the USA under private funding, cold fusion work has continued and does continue to produce intriguing and increasingly reproduceable results. Seems it may be a matter of technique, and the MIT crew, although superlative nuclear physicists, are rather mediochre chemists. Current wisdom is that the crux of the problem is how densely you can load the palladium (or titanium, or whatever) with deuterium. If you aren't skilled and meticulous, you won't see results.
MIT based most of their conclusions, or rather, preconceptions, on the fact that the reaction D + D -> He leaves He with a lot of energy. So much, in fact, that it almost always spits out an energetic neutron. No neutrons, no fusion, unless the He can somehow unload its energy to other atoms. That never happens in MIT's hot plasma because the time scale of the nuclear reaction is many orders of magnitude faster than the time scale of the atom-to-atom Coulomb interactions.
But, something else may be going on in Pons and Fleischmann's palladium crystal. The impetus for their work was an estimated 2ev chemical potential for deuterium in the palladium lattice. As they point out in their article, that corresponds to an "astronomically high" pressure -- some 10^24 atmospheres. That's high enough to drop Coulomb interaction times down to the required nuclear interaction times, thereby inducing D-D fusion and at the same time providing a means for the resulting He to unload its energy to the surrounding crystal lattice. The MIT physicists were thinking to much "in the box."
Sorry for the long post. It's just that I don't believe the last chapter has been written on cold fusion, and that there has been an awful lot of disinformation disseminated against it. Besides, if cold fusion's for real, it'll be raining soup! I'm just not ready to give it up.