Their background search would take them here, where they would see he is a big believer in LENR, therefore his paper must have something to do with it. That would be the end of that.
I am not proposing an aspiring LENR theorist decide to never try for a peer review for fear of rejection. If they have the time and energy, I say go for it. But IMO, there have been many others who have gone down that rigorous path, only to be met with a door closed in their face. Could be wrong though.
The gatekeepers, those who essentially decide what is 'respectable' to talk about, guard the esteemed journals. Peer view is generally still intact there. But god forbid you want to publish what is not deemed respectable in those journals. I hate to quote from Wiki, but here goes.
Julian Seymour Schwinger (/ˈʃwɪŋər/; February 12, 1918 – July 16, 1994) was a Nobel Prize winning Americantheoretical physicist. He is best known for his work on the theory of quantum electrodynamics (QED), in particular for developing a relativistically invariant perturbation theory, and for renormalizing QED to one loop order. Schwinger was a physics professor at several universities.
Schwinger is recognized as one of the greatest physicists of the twentieth century ....
After 1989 Schwinger took a keen interest in the non-mainstream research of cold fusion. He wrote eight theory papers about it. He resigned from the American Physical Society after their refusal to publish his papers. He felt that cold fusion research was being suppressed and academic freedom violated. He wrote: "The pressure for conformity is enormous. I have experienced it in editors' rejection of submitted papers, based on venomous criticism of anonymous referees. The replacement of impartial reviewing by censorship will be the death of science."