That sounds like an excuse to me. He can post his paper on his website or on Arxiv.
If the content of the paper is like his design drawings for his fusion reactor, though, "premature" is not an unfair word. I'd guess the submission contains a lot of informally-described material that is not rigorous, and does not meet the reader's expectations of a scientific paper.
Perhaps he has discovered something interesting. Not all scientists in history have known what they discovered, or known how to explain what they found. I will reserve final judgment until I see more details, but preliminary judgment does not look good.
Agreed, I don't hold any hope for this, but I also don't have the expertise to honestly judge it. Makes for a nice local news story though, I just wish they'd have taken a slightly more critical look.
His ideas are that familiar mix of a few catchy pop-science ideas (fractals and Alcubierre drives) and pseduo-science (Bermuda Triangle), that's typically a dead giveaway for a crackpot.
If the content of the paper is like his design drawings for his fusion reactor, though, "premature" is not an unfair word. I'd guess the submission contains a lot of informally-described material that is not rigorous, and does not meet the reader's expectations of a scientific paper.
Take a look at his material on fusion, and in particular his design diagram for a fusion reactor: http://www.paresspacewarpresearch.org/WEFiles/Image/WEImage/... (from http://www.paresspacewarpresearch.org/Future/Fusion.htm). Here are some comments from another garage experimenter and physicist: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=8815059
Perhaps he has discovered something interesting. Not all scientists in history have known what they discovered, or known how to explain what they found. I will reserve final judgment until I see more details, but preliminary judgment does not look good.