The physicists weren't excited. They pointed out that if Pons and Fleischman had been making enough DD fusion to boil water, they'd have been killed by the neutrons.
The internet of the time consisted of NNTP newsgroups. There was a lot of talk about it by a lot of people, and a lot of opinions and claims of expertise. Filtering out what was true wasn't that easy.
I am not a nuclear physicist and nobody I knew at the time was, either, though personally I thought it was one of those too-good-to-be-true things, and sure enough, it was.
My larger point, however, was that there was a lot of pushback from environmentalists who, when faced with a solution to the energy problem, looked for a way to stop it.
