Many, if not most, of the LENR detractors/skeptics base their viewpoint on a position that LENR can’t work because it contradicts the laws of physics. The heart of the matter lies in engineering. A good engineer will use the optimum physical principle to get the job done.
As a example, a Wakefield accelerator that is just a few feet in length uses a different set of physical laws to do what the CERN 17 mile diameter accelerator does. A scientist who specialized in nuclear physics may not understand what laws to apply to get his job done in a more optimized way. That does not make the physical principles applied in the optimized solution invalid. It just means that the engineers of the optimized solution have amazed the scientist to such a huge extent that the scientist is baffled into disbelief when he sees the results of the engineering. Another example is the reactionless engine that NASA has just tested that supposedly violates Newton's Laws of Motion. It turns out that the EMF field used in the engine pushes against the virtual particles in the vacuum. This does not make the test that NASA conducted of that engine a SCAM or the engineers who understand what is going on morons.
