There's some pretty hard proof of Pons-esque cold fusion in recent years; for example, some tests a while back showed that deuterium in palladium could produce

There's some pretty hard proof of Pons-esque cold fusion in recent years; for example, some tests a while back showed that deuterium in palladium could produce a large number of isotopes of heavy metals, each multiples of 4 greater in atomic mass than palladium, suggesting fusion into helium to produce alpha particles, which then were absorbed by the palladium nuclei. I think it's a pretty sure bet here that fusion is going on somewhere in some fashion. Now, what is not obvious is whether one could actually get any sort of useful energy out of this. We already have tabletop neutron generators that classify as a form of "cold fusion"--they just take a lot more energy in than they put out and there's no practical way to make them more efficient, as opposed to magnetic confinement fusion which does show promise for scaling up. Of course, it all needs more research, which is why the way the topic has been poisoned by Pons/Fleischmann is really a problem.