There can be problems when someone comes up with a new idea that isn't mainstream or appears to contradict the established orthodoxy but science is resolved by experiment and once another laboratory (or two) has repeated the experiment and obtained the same result it is accepted (although not always by the old guard defenders of the previous model).
The periodic table now has a new complete row after IUPAC yesterday decided that the evidence for the synthetic elements was adequate.
Normally though younger scientists strive to find holes in the existing orthodoxy and there is great celebration and Nobel prizes to be had when someone discovers something truly novel and unexpected. Pulsars, buckyballs, graphene to name a few of the more recent discoveries.
Big Bang cosmology was still disputed by a handful of surviving Hoyle era Steady State loyalists like Arp until his death in 2013 for example.
A particularly sad one was the Belousov-Zhabotinsky chemical clock reaction discovered in the Soviet Union during the Cold War by the unfortunate Belousov. His claims of a non-equilibrium reaction that literally went tick-tock seemed so absurd to chemists of the time that he could not get it published in any reputable journal and died without ever knowing how unusual his reaction was. It made it out into the West and was noticed after Zhabotinsky explained how it worked in the 70's. It is a staple of popular school science lectures today as it shows some very quirky behaviour when done in a shallow dish.
(sorry about the annoying music)
Even sadder was the suicide of the very brilliant but mentally unstable Boltzmann who was somewhat persecuted by the establishment for his insisting that atoms and molecules were real so formulating statistical thermodynamics. Scientists do have egos - some of them very big ones.
I am glad to hear that. There are far too many credulous fools about who deserve to lose their shirts on the LENR scam. LENR is in the same camp of fake science as N-rays and denying that NASA went to the moon.
Simpler to patent it and rake in the royalties. If it were a genuine fusion invention it would easily satisfy all the requirements to patent.
There was a sad example of a perfectly good invention demonstrated on the UK science programme "Tomorrows World" that was a fire resistant plastic "Starlite" capable of protecting an egg from an oxyacetylene torch and nuclear flash. It demonstrably worked but he had no clue how to go about scaling up from a lab setting to industrial scale. He was impossible to collaborate with and never secured any licensing deals although he spent inordinate sums of money with lawyers. He died taking the secret of his magic plastic formulation to the grave in 2011 without ever managing to make any money out of his invention.
This one was demonstrably a real material but the developer flatly refused to license it in any sensible manner so he made not a penny.
I wonder if his samples of Starlite still survive somewhere? Modern analytical techniques might be able to unpick it.