While there definitely are certain physicists who made a name for themselves debunking Pons and Fleischmann back in the 90's, there are also many, even at Caltech, who were not convinced that it was just an error. Most physicists I know are open to the fact that there may be something to the idea, but they have no grant money to spend in researching it. Grad students are (or at least were when I was at school) routinely cautioned that researching it is a career killer, so they generally avoid the subject. Any progress on the idea has thus been limited to unexplained phenomena that are artifacts of some other experiment, and that has been insufficient to really advance the field in any meaningful way. But as these physicists who went through school in the early 90's have now become tenured professors with more latitude, I suspect that some have never really conclusively decided the whole idea was crazy. And I wouldn't be at all surprised if some of them are harboring secret theories and data which, while likely not conclusive, are at least intriguing. All it may take is one conclusive experiment to open the floodgates and years of unofficial research into something truly revolutionary may be released. Or it could really all be just an error. But of all the conspiracies I have ever heard on suppressed energy projects, this is one area I could actually believe is real.