So, the argument here is that because CCS/ATER explains only some of the LENR corpus of results, it is obviously wrong.
Right. That plus the fact that his theory violates many fundamental laws, and nothing remotely like what he describes has been observed in the last 180 years of electrochemistry.
Or, as the saying goes, when you hear hoofs, think horses, not unicorns.
But that corpus is problematic: were it indisputable and replicable mainstream science would have a very different view of LENR.
The excess heat results, the tritium and helium are indisputable. That is to say, no one has ever disputed them. There are no published papers showing errors in the measurements of any mainstream paper, except Shanahan and Morrison, who are both crackpots in my opinion. You can read their papers and judge that for yourself. Morrison is here:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/Fleischmanreplytothe.pdf
The mainstream science rejection of cold fusion is because of academic politics and funding disputes. It is led by plasma fusion researchers who will lose their livelihood if cold fusion research is funded. It has nothing to do with scientific issues. If results similar to cold fusion were published in any other field, no mainstream scientist would dispute them, any more than they dispute thermodynamics or Faraday's laws, which together are proof that cold fusion is real.
A more accurate approach would be to see which results CCS/ATER could apply to, look at the rest, and see whether they remain compellingly anomalous.
They do. But, more to the point, I do not think we would be justified in throwing away the entire corpus of electrochemical heat balances and calorimetry going back to Faraday and Joule because of this one theory. I think it is extremely unlikely that Shanahan has discovered that generations of electrochemists were wrong. And if they were not wrong, how could the present generation be wrong, since as Fleischmann pointed out, he is using the techniques developed by Faraday and Joule.
Shanahan also fails to explain why this calorimetric error occurs only with Pd-D and not Pt-D or Pd-H; and why it only happens at high loading; how it correlates with helium, tritium and x-rays, and much else. In other words, he only "explains" one of the anomalies, ignoring the others, and his explanation violates textbook physics.
But you don't need me to explain all of this. Marwan et al. blew Shanahan out of the water years ago:
http://lenr-canr.org/acrobat/MarwanJanewlookat.pdf
Shanahan continues in the Monty Python "Black Knight" mode, not realizing that his arms and legs are amputated. It is pathetic. As I said, this is classic crackpot science.