The common thread in practitioners of this stuff, and people attacking those who call it out as rubbish, seems to be rejecting nuclear physics while claiming to be observing (or supporting the possibility of) nuclear processes. I don't mean just established nuclear theory and experiment. Convincing evidence for reaction products is missing -- both nuclear and chemical ones -- and I'd expect detecting reaction products to be relatively easy compared with accurate calorimetry. People qualified to do make such measurements doubtless won't be considered sufficiently neutral, shall we say, about the physics. Anyhow, rather than say "it doesn't happen" they would be able to put a decent limit on the rate of such processes, whatever their a priori attitude. "Science doesn't care what you believe", as I recently saw on a T-shirt.
I remember when the Fleischmann and Pons stuff first appeared. It was so obviously pathological science that it didn't seem worth devoting resources towards it. Did you know that palladium is a particularly useful target for nuclear physics? Then I was doing spectroscopy on fusion reactions with it (and we had probably the best gamma-ray, neutron, and recoil nuclei detectors). There was no evidence of any anomalies associated with palladium. Apropos possibly burying evidence against established physics: those measurements demonstrated that the conventional wisdom about aspects of the processes was wrong. In contrast, I studied fusion reactions for which actual nuclear physicists presented evidence against the basic compound nucleus model; better measurements and calculations supported the model. The work was peer reviewed in the usual nuclear physics journals, of course.