I planned to set up a similar experiment and bombard a hydrogen loaded target with muons, or move the experiment to the top of a Carpathian mountain, but the institute of nuclear research in Kharkiv, Ukraine is under attack, so it's not possible.
The idea of using ErD3 instead of Nickel or Palladium is very good, because it saves weeks of time to load the target with Deuterium.
Physicists knew P&F's nonsense was garbage because it required multiple miracles (that fusion would occur, that the ordinary fusion reactions would not, that some weird non-standard fusion reaction would occur instead.) Far, far more likely was they just were bumblers. And when replication failed (and it did fail; other vaguely similar but different sporadic results are not "replication") that prior was validated.