Wanna buy a bridge...?
Due to our great need for powerful atom bombs and hydrogen bombs to counter the Soviet Threat we put most of our money into the study of the strong nuclear force and virtually nothing into the weak nuclear force, consequently we have tens of thousands of highly educated physicists and engineers who know everything there is to know about making bombs, and virtually none with enough knowledge to come up with a working "strong nuclear force" fusion reactor!
Worse, NONE of them have any interest at all in dealing with the electro-weak force.
That's where Rossi and Focardi come in, as well as many other scientists and research engineers whose primary training is in physical chemistry.
More recently their approach to providing energy through manipulation of the electro-weak force has received some serious attention ~ particularly as projects like "hot fusion" have utterly failed even while wasting hundreds of billions of dollars. Hot fusion is like Keynesian Economics ~ lots of promise, lots of theories, NO GO.
Given the dominance of the hot fusion proponents in the world of physics it has been difficult for the cold fusion enthusiasts to get the financing necessary to proceed along lines of theory in the electroweak force that seem to have promise.
Which is where "self financing" comes into play. It's not exactly like "selling bridges" but there are folks throughout the world of strong nuclear force studies who see impending doom for their work if even one guy comes up with a working electroweak device that produces energy in commercial quantities. They are squealing like pigs at the moment, and if this Italian device works at all, you'll hear screams like monkeys in the zoo!