[sammyg2]

Seriously, around 1984 I was doing some work at Lawrence Livermore labs. There was a big ole shiny thing in the next room and I asked one of the scientist types what it was. He told me it was a mock-up of a fusion reactor to be put in orbit.
I asked if it worked, and he said no, not yet. It's just a mock-up. Note that he didn't say anything about cold fusion, just fusion.

Why would they make a mock-up of something unless they thought it was feasible? Were they just burning up grant money? Was the guy yanking my chain? Who knows.

At the time they had mistakenly given me my father's security clearance which was significantly higher than what I should have had (I'm named after my father and he had a very high clearance, he spent much of his career developing experimental weapon delivery systems).

There was quite a bit of interviews when they discovered the mistake.