I am happy to announce the release of the new edition of the book The End of Fire: Hydrino Energy and the Future of Physics now live in kindle and paperback edition. As I get started on the ambitious project of the audiobook recording, I am happy to share the first chapter!
Chapter 1: A Gift From Nature
In which the author first discovers the controversy of the hydrino atom, and we learn how to make a sun in a box.
WE ARRIVED IN PRINCETON, New Jersey, on a humid summer day. My girlfriend and I had just driven across the continent for the first time in a used car we bought only days earlier, after completing our third year of college in Oregon. We found Princeton to be idyllic, surrounded by farms and forests, bounded on one side by a river with a stone bridge that overlooked a boathouse where racing shells cut lines through the placid water.
The air was swarming with cicadas, an insect that emerges from hives beneath the roots of old trees once every seventeen years to swarm, mate, and die. The air was filled with the white noise of cicada chirps, and the ground was strewn with the carcasses of the fallen. Occasionally one would fly in the car window and cause much screaming and commotion before it was successfully voided out again.
Bell Street, where we would spend the summer of 2004, was a charming lane lined with brightly colored townhouses. I would later recognize our street as an on-location shoot from the movie “IQ” starring Walter Matthau as Einstein. Ours was a fourth-floor studio apartment with only a hot plate in lieu of a kitchen.
Outside town some ten miles was Cranbury, an area filled with corporate campuses in science, technology, and medicine. Situated there was Brilliant Light Power (BLP), a small, private research and development laboratory that claimed it had a new energy source that would change the world.
I have always been fascinated by science and nature. I was 12 when I started reading popular science books on quantum mechanics and relativity. By the time I was in high school I was taking physics, chemistry, and engineering classes and then hopping on a public bus to a local college to study ancient Greek philosophy. (Yeah, I was that teenager.)
This extra classwork in the evening gave me a free class period during the day for independent study. I told my supervisor I wanted to program an algorithm for simulating the flight of birds. Instead, I stumbled upon something interesting in the science news that captured my attention.
Randell (“Randy”) Mills, the chief scientist at BLP, had proposed a new source of energy and a new theory of the physics of the atom. He even spoke of a new kind of atom, a sort of shrunken hydrogen atom that he called a “hydrino,” an atom that the prevalent theory of atomic physics—quantum mechanics—said should not exist.
Starting in 1999, a columnist for the Village Voice, Eric Baard, was inspired by Mills’s story to write a series of articles. He portrayed Mills as an innovator challenging the status quo. Although I was not fluent in the scientific background, I was fascinated by the story and began digesting everything I could find.
History is rife with entertaining inventions based on flawed, discredited, or mystical theories. Energy technologies top this list: fuel-enhancing cocktails, super-carburetors, even barely disguised perpetual motion machines, which (conceivably) once started would run forever. These are not physically possible; although in a vacuum, with no friction, you can make a device that moves for almost forever, you can’t make something that creates energy, that does mechanical work, from nothing. There is always a source.
Usable energy can come from chemical reactions, nuclear reactions, sunlight, mechanical work from the environment such as tidal or wave action, gravity that pulls on water that has been dammed in a reservoir, or even tiny temperature differences. And when you try to use this energy, it is always at least a little inefficient, resulting in some extra heat due to friction that diffuses into the environment.
“Perpetual motion”—particularly the creation of usable energy from nothing—violates the laws of thermodynamics.
Mythical technologies that have been proposed in the last century include pulsed electromagnetic motors; those that use static electricity; motors that are motionless or use magnetic fields in mysterious ways; those that use particles (“N-rays” or “G-rays”) that don’t exist; those that produce power by way of gyroscopes and pendulums; something called “Zero-Point energy;” or “the Aether Electric Accumulator,” generating power from space itself, I guess.
My favorite is a “Cosmic” energy source, which legend tells was dumped into a river. And therefore lost to man.
Shortly before Mills emerged, in 1989, a university claimed that two respected scientists had achieved heat production from “fusion,” the nuclear process that mashes atomic nuclei together. This occurs deep in the core of the Sun at very high temperature and pressure. But these two scientists claimed they had achieved it at room temperature in a small benchtop device—“cold fusion.” It created a media sensation but flopped. Within a month there had been a nationwide debunking of the claims, and it created a renewed suspicion on the part of physicists, institutions, and government for new energy claims. But a community of interested researchers lingered.
By coincidence, Mills emerged around this time, in 1991. His experimental apparatus closely resembled that of the cold fusion cell: a cell filled with liquid water and equipped with electrodes to liberate hydrogen from water with electricity, to enable the hydrogen to participate in a reaction. But Mills’s cells were designed to enable a chemical reaction with hydrogen, not a nuclear one.
Cold fusion scientists were attracted to Mills’s work. He was getting more reliable energy from his cells, and his reaction could also explain the sometimes-promising results from cold fusion cells. There was chatter about his experiments at conferences. But at a glance, Mills’s idea was hard to tell apart from cold fusion.
In the 1990’s the United States government committed to an international collaboration to develop fusion as the power source of the future. Instead of cold, it would be hot, and require enormous, billion-dollar reactors. Funding for alternative (now considered “fringe” ideas) dried up, and national laboratories had become hostile to anything remotely resembling cold fusion.
In 1901, scientists believed that commercial interests tainted the purity of science; they toasted the discovery of the electron by saying “let it prove no commercial value.” Though we live in an age of electronics, the vestiges of that attitude remain today.
Mills claimed to the press that he had discovered a new power source that would make energy cheap, clean, and abundant. He also had scientific data backing up his claims. Forgoing the grant process with the National Science Foundation, Mills started a company to develop his idea. By the time of Baard’s articles, he had raised millions in capital from private sources, including energy utilities. He did so, as a supporter put it, “without largess from the US government, and without benediction of the US scientific priesthood.” Mills had created an incubator doing basic research to develop a groundbreaking new technology from new physics. It was almost unheard of.
With his venture capital, Mills bought a facility and employed a team of Ph.D. scientists, publishing their findings widely. He had high-profile individuals in energy and technology on his company board of advisers.
Industry people had positive impressions of Mills, but notable physicists interviewed by Baard gave dismissive, off-hand remarks. Following the story in Baard’s articles, I found it perplexing and burned with the desire to learn more.
I began to do research. At one point, my room supervisor looked over my shoulder and found me propped in a chair with reams of scientific papers spilling over my lap, covered in equations. I obviously wasn’t making progress on simulating the flight of birds during my free period.
She raised an eyebrow and shrugged.
Was Mills a lonely fool caught up in an infinite energy fantasy, or a brilliant scientist and inventor who would change the world?
There was no one I could turn to for answers; I would need to decide for myself. At stake was everything: new technological possibilities and new ways of looking at the universe. And I would need to immerse myself in both physics and chemistry to have any chance of wrapping my brain around the problem.
In September of 2001, I began my freshman year at Reed College. I had been wooed by the promise of a population of intelligent and weirdly obsessed students, and by the school’s deep commitment to a “life of the mind” enjoyed on sprawling green lawns. The curriculum was conservative in the academic sense: all students are required to study philosophy, history, and the literature of Ancient Greece and Rome. I couldn’t wait.
On the first day of orientation, I spent hours in philosophical conversation with a fellow student while walking the sunny streets of downtown Portland, before, as we were about to part, remembering to introduce ourselves.
Later that day, I began talking up professors about Mills.
During my first year, chemistry professors would get into interesting, detailed conversations with me about Mills’s experimental reports. Although they were generally skeptical, they were gracious. But in the physics department, I found a potent, viscerally negative reaction to Mills that precluded a genuine and thoughtful discussion of his theories or his experimental results. One professor made it clear that he thought my interest in Mills was akin to mysticism. “I once had a student who claimed she was from Venus,” he said, with the heaviness of implication. I bit my lip.
Over the next three years, I was driven by my interest in Mills and the potentially sweeping importance of his ideas to study organic and inorganic chemistry alongside electrodynamics and quantum physics – an exhausting schedule. By running back and forth between two science departments, I was arming myself with the ability to understand both Mills’s theories and experiments. I also felt I was obtaining a wider view of nature than my peers confined within each discipline.
In my sparce free time, I sought out a local professor, Reinhart Engelmann, an electrical engineer who had voiced his support for Mills and was working at the nearby Oregon Health and Science University. We would sit down occasionally and go over his analysis of Mills’s theories, his comments thoughtful and complex, showing that Mills’s work was worth taking seriously.
By my third year, the shelf in my dorm room was filled with a stack of Mills’s journal publications with detailed annotations from my chemistry professors, a binder full of physics articles that I had photocopied from old volumes in the library, and a copy of Mills’s heavy book that I had owned since high school.
The book, The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics, had (at the time) a black cover and a gold-embossed logo on the front that resembled the emblem of a space-dwelling civilization. It was a massive theoretical treatise full of dense mathematical derivations. I had gone through it several times and highlighted it thoroughly.
The first three years of college gave me experience using a wide range of laboratory equipment. In the spring of my third year, I sent an application to Brilliant Light Power applying for a summer internship position. The professor who had questioned my sanity a few years earlier, Nick Wheeler, even wrote me a recommendation. I later learned it began with “I think this student’s interest in your work is crazy, but…” which must have raised eyebrows.
During finals week I received a call from the company’s vice president, Bill Good. He explained that they needed someone to take data and assist with various experiments in the laboratory.
I had the job.
BRILLIANT LIGHT POWER was situated in a laboratory formerly used by General Electric for the building and testing of satellites. The campus included a water tower, a high bay with a traversing crane, and a giant vacuum chamber—a cylindrical steel colossus that looked like a Mars base—standing in the back parking lot. Mills had told the press that he was going to build his first power plant in that chamber (why anywhere else?) and though it never happened, the chamber was massive and almost impossible to move, so there it remained.
On my first day, I was introduced to Mills. His spacious office had a giant oil painting of the Earth as seen from space hanging on the brick wall behind his desk. He smiled, charmingly. I shook his hand.
Mills was 6’-6” with an athletic build and diagonal eyebrows, the kind of physique you expect to be operating a tractor or running a factory. He was excitable and would laugh freely, like a child. He had brilliance in his eyes but was unpretentious, never speaking down to others but often talking as if everyone in the room was a Ph.D.-level physicist (endearingly unaffected that most of them were not).
He was a farmer’s son who grew up operating big machines. Once, on a frigid morning, the battery of a tractor exploded in his face. Without opening his eyes, he made his way into the house to dump baking soda over his face, neutralizing the acid before it thawed. Farm life was a daily battle with the laws of nature.
Although Mills had a Medical Degree from Harvard, he had the heart of an inventor. While earning his degree, he had demonstrated a polymathic aptitude for the physical sciences and mathematics. Completing the coursework for his MD in only three years—which was unheard of—he filled his final year with electives at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) in graduate-level physics.
In the years after graduation, he leveraged his abilities to propose several innovative new medical technologies. One of these, for a low-dose radiation cancer therapy, earned him an article in Nature—the world’s most prestigious scientific journal.
It was his first paper.
Mills had the work ethic of a farmer, the inventiveness of Edison, and the brain of Einstein; he was an engineer-scholar, a modern man, a quintessential American mind.
The time at MIT would prove to be a pivotal experience. His professor there, Herman Haus, had just authored a paper on the physics of light. In general, light is produced by wiggling electric charges. Haus’s paper described, for the first time, exactly what kinds of wiggling produced light, and more importantly, which didn’t.
Although the paper was solving a general (and obscure) problem in physics, when Mills read the paper, he felt it held unique insight into the problem of the atom.
For atoms to exist in the universe, the charged particles that make them up must be in a stable motion that does not lose energy, that does not emit light. (This is perpetual motion, but only because there is no friction on the atomic scale.) The only conceivable reason for this stability was the one that Haus had formally described in his paper for the first time.
Haus allowed Mills to reverse-engineer the architecture of matter and develop a sweeping new theory of nature. The idea, however, would strike at the heart of established physics doctrine.
From the discovery of the electron in 1897 to roughly 1925, physicists sought a model for understanding the atom that was based on the physical laws known at the time, now known as the “classical” laws of nature. These laws, familiar on the scale of everyday life, include the laws of electricity and magnetism, mechanics, and thermodynamics. These offer a picture of a clear, clockwork universe. But physicists were unable to explain the behavior of the atom in classical terms.
In 1925, a revolution in thought occurred, and physicists invented “quantum mechanics.” It didn’t speak the same language as classical laws and was the beginning of a rift that would divide the foundations of our knowledge.
Mills had always been frustrated with quantum theory; it offered only a murky understanding of the atomic world, in which fundamental particles were interchangeably imagined as both waves and point-like objects. It was also unable to perform calculations that would allow it to reliably reproduce known light emissions from most atoms, and it was filled with conceptual quagmires that have plagued physics since its invention.
Haus’s discovery, interpreted by Mills, would be a bridge from the past to the future of physics, from the macroscopic to the microscopic world, potentially explaining all quantum mechanical phenomena with classical laws for the first time.
Central to atomic theory is the problem of the hydrogen atom. In Bohr’s model, developed prior to the invention of quantum mechanics (the “planetary” model of the atom still taught to schoolchildren today), the electron orbits the proton like a planet orbits the Sun. But if electrons did so in this way, they should give off light and lose energy as they follow a circular path. They would collapse into the proton in a fraction of a second. This doesn’t happen.
Using Haus’s equations, Mills found that while a point-like particle must decay and give off light, a particle with an extended physical shape, such as a spherical shell, could remain stable. Mills proposed a model of the electron that completely surrounds the proton, what we might call the “soap bubble” model. On the surface of this ultra-thin shell, filaments of electric current flowed in a fan of trajectories, with the proton at the center.
And, it worked.
The most important test for an atomic theory is to match and predict behavior of the electron when it absorbs and emits light. Like a planet, the electron may occupy different orbits, but unlike a planet, only certain orbits are allowed. The smallest orbit, and the only one that is stable, is the “ground state.” Other orbits are called “excited states,” and the electron must absorb light to jump to these orbits. Since they are unstable, the electron will always decay and fall back to the ground state by releasing light. We know the precise energies of these transitions from experiments.
For the first time, Haus’s discovery, utilized by Mills, explained why the ground state was stable, and why excited states were not; it predicted the correct energies for hydrogen, and opened the floodgates to calculating hundreds of atomic spectra that had never been correctly calculated by quantum mechanics before.
Quantum mechanics, however, was a theory that had been around for eighty years, been labored over by thousands of physicists, and had been described repeatedly as “the most successful theory of all time.” Physicists snarled at the thought of overturning it. Its inventors—Heisenberg, Born, Pauli, Schrödinger, Dirac—are gods of physics. To question them is heresy.
Despite how effective Mills’s solution was on paper, there was almost no interest in Mills’s ideas. No top-tier journal devoted to theoretical physics accepted Mills’s proposal for publication. That didn’t stop him from continuing to develop it.
We expect a good theory of nature to not only explain known data but make new predictions. The first major prediction of Mills’s new model is that under certain conditions, the hydrogen atom should be able to release energy without the emission of light, in a “resonant transfer” reaction. Doing so would coax the atom to shrink to an orbit smaller than the ground state. This had never been observed before. Mills predicted an entire class of hydrogen atoms that are fractional multiples (1/2, 1/3, 1/4, and so on) the size of the ground state. He called these “hydrino” atoms.
Moreover, the reaction that produced hydrino atoms from ordinary hydrogen would be powerfully exothermic, releasing energy. The amount would be hundreds of times more energetic than combustion. Such a power source would conceivably allow the use of ordinary water as fuel.
If Mills was right, he had made a quantum leap from a new theory of nature to a powerful new energy source for mankind.
Rolling up his sleeves, Mills would go on to lead a 30-year effort to show the hydrino was real, that it could be found in nature, and that it could be manufactured under the right conditions.
By the time of Baard’s articles, Mills’s experiments no longer resembled cold fusion cells. He had developed experiments that used a hot, ionized, light-emitting gas (called a “plasma”) to sustain the reaction. The light, clearly visible in glass reaction cells, had unique signatures that revealed a new kind of reaction—the hydrino reaction—was taking place.
Aside from some attention in the popular press, the response of scientists to Mills’s publications was only cicada chirps.
THE MAIN LAB FLOOR in 2004 was filled with experimental apparatuses under a canopy of cords and water lines. Some reactor cells were placed in large foam cubes and submerged in water; others were placed inside hot kilns. Stations were constantly being torn down, reconfigured, rebuilt, and replumbed.
Technicians shuffled in and out of the lab in blue lab coats, and scientists with offices throughout the building ambled by, monitoring experiments throughout the day. These were specialists in plasma physics, microwave physics, electrochemistry, and chemical engineering, with backgrounds in industry and academia. I found them to be sober and experienced.
When a new type of reactor showed promise, Mills would direct the manufacturing of a new line of stations to replicate the original cell. It was a prototyping facility, a factory of data gathered day and night, producing results for Mills and his scientists to analyze in weekly meetings.
My first summer, I was given a variety of projects: I programmed measurement systems, soldered electronics, and operated a setup for preparing samples for analysis. I was a hard-working jolt of energy myself, running around in a pale blue lab coat with my name embroidered on it.
Although Mills had been designing chemical reactions that could make hydrino for fifteen years, in 2004 his team were still learning what kinds of reactions worked best under various conditions.
A hydrino atom was a new species with unique chemical characteristics. And because making a hydrino atom brings two particles that attract—the proton and electron—closer together, the hydrino reaction was predicted to release energy, just like a chemical reaction forming a tighter bond. Evidence for hydrino was two-fold: chemical signatures and heat.
Heat could be measured in careful experiments. In reactors in operation at BLP at the time, trials could take two weeks: one week for a control and one week for an experimental run. Careful measurements of the temperature of the cell would tell us if something was happening.
Because hydrino gas (a dimer of two hydrino atoms) is much smaller than ordinary hydrogen, helium, or anything else known, trapping the gas in a container for long enough to run experiments was difficult. One way to do so was to absorb the gas in the crystalline lattice of salt exposed to the reaction. By the end of the experiment, the salt would be infused with hydrino gas, forming beautiful blue, purple, or green samples to analyze.
One of my jobs was to heat up the salt to release the gas, then cryogenically cool the gas into a quartz tube, seal it with a torch, and run to Princeton University to analyze the samples.
I’m sure it was no coincidence that Mills bought a facility located only a short drive from one of the most prestigious physics universities in the world. Although Princeton was a haven for plasma physicists, it was incentivized to develop hot fusion, and there was no interest in Mills’s research. But we could access the Princeton libraries and purchase time on their equipment.
We regularly leased time on their nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) spectrometer. In these samples, we found signatures caused by hydrino gas and compounds that were unique in the literature, without any other explanation.
Unique signatures could also be found using a wide range of different techniques (as we will see throughout this book), confirming for me that Mills’s theories were backed up by real data, published and freely available to anyone willing to look.
Mills was largely unaffected by the perception of others. He had his own funding, a spacious office, a laboratory at his command, an intense working lifestyle, a routine at the gym, and a large brick home with a family in Princeton. When I asked about the skepticism from the community, he shrugged and said it was only a matter of time. He could wait.
During my tenure at BLP, Mills divided his time between theoretical work and directing his laboratory scientists, reading and writing articles, and writing patents. He pulled long hours and was often in the office on weekends, with his children running around the lobby. It sometimes felt like he lived at the office. His work ethic was incomparable. It was clear that he was genuinely excited by his work and energized by each step forward.
On days where I prepared samples, it would require hours of time for the apparatus to be evacuated of contaminants like air and water vapor with a vacuum pump between sessions. I built additional stations to increase my productivity, but I had free time.
I was given an office cube and would use the time to study Mills’s theory. I would rarely see Mills when I was busy in the laboratory, but when I was at my desk, he would often saunter by. He began to drop drafts of his latest theoretical work on my desk. A pile quickly formed. I began to look through them and we began to chat more often.
One day Mills asked if I could help run some calculations and create some visuals of his work. At first, I fit this around my lab schedule, but as summer wore on, it became a higher priority; I began contributing usefully to Mills’s process with scientific visualizations and mathematical workbooks.
By the end of summer, I had one foot in the lab and one in the theory; I was busy and enjoying the work.
In lieu of returning to school in the fall, I was asked to stay. I had not yet finished my college degree, but here I had an opportunity to do the kind of work that had motivated me for years.
Mills was asking me to help reinvent our theory of nature. My decision was already made.
IN 1871, CHARLES DARWIN remarked that next to language, the discovery of fire was the greatest ever made by man. It was enabled by uniquely human powers of “observation, memory, curiosity, imagination, and reason,” the basis for our ingenuity. Unique in the history of life, humans make discoveries and harness them for survival.
Fire has served man since before our species evolved to its modern form, over a million years ago. Our use of fire created a cascade of consequences: we heat-treated stones to better form tools; we cultivated the landscape with controlled burning; we used fire to keep us warm in colder climates, which allowed us to expand across the landscape; we began cooking a wider variety of foods, which also unlocked more resources for our brain.
Fire became the handmaiden of our species, integral to every technological advance. In the last 10,000 years, we have become especially reliant on energy. We now each use 40 times that of our hunter gatherer ancestors.
Despite the invention of many new energy sources over the last century, fossil fuels have remained the cheapest and most broadly used. They have given us massive wealth, but scientists agree that their use has dealt a devastating shock to the Earth: a warming climate, acidified oceans, oil spills, and the release of toxic chemicals. Our exploitation of fire has surpassed the limits of nature.
In the Paris Climate Accords, nations around the world pledged to limit global temperature rise to 1.5° C to alleviate what climate scientists perceive to be the worst of the potential future impacts due to the use of fossil fuels. But to meet this target, we can emit no more than 590 gigatons of CO2, or 10 more years at current rates. The cost to do so, to decarbonize the economy with known alternatives, is likely $100 trillion. It would require a marshaling of resources that the world has never seen.
Darwin reminds us that our ability to innovate originated in nature under conditions that challenged our survival. Our technological innovation is our natural gift. Yet, we exist within nature; we are a part of it. There are now so many of us—over 8 billion—that our activity as a species can easily overwhelm the natural flows in the biosphere, causing us to rapidly experience the consequences of our own unsustainable acts. Our impact also strains the web of life around us.
Nature always endures in the deep scale of time, but humanity is fragile. To sustain our existence, we must preserve the great tapestry of life and pass it along to the next generation. To do so, we must reduce our impact even while advancing our prosperity.
In the first half of this book, we will follow 35 years of research and development by Mills and his team—a braided path of science and engineering with dead ends and leaps of creative insight—that resulted in the “SunCell.” It is the answer to the survival and prosperity of our species on Earth.
So, let’s look at how it works.
The hydrino reaction, as harnessed by the SunCell, is different from fire in a fundamental way.
Fire (“combustion”) is a chemical reaction. As with all chemical reactions, the energy released comes from breaking and reforming molecular bonds. The fuel (wood, for instance) must be made of organic molecules containing carbon. When these molecules are exposed to oxygen at high temperature, they rearrange into more stable ones like carbon dioxide (CO2) and water (H2O), releasing about 20 MJ / kg of extra energy. Even more is released from coal, gasoline, and natural gas.
Most of the light released by combustion is in the “infrared” wavelengths, less energetic (longer wavelengths) than what we can see. Although it is invisible, we feel it on our skin as heat. It makes fire good at doing mechanical work: in the combustion chamber of an engine, the infrared frequencies are easily absorbed by gas, rapidly heating it and causing it to expand, pushing the piston.
By contrast, the hydrino reaction produces light in a region more energetic (shorter wavelengths) than what we can see: the “ultraviolet” (UV), “extreme ultraviolet” (EUV) and beyond. This is because the energy transition from a hydrogen atom to a hydrino atom is so much greater than that of forming a single chemical bond.
In the reaction chamber of the SunCell, a bulb-like transparent cell, the high-energy light from the hydrino reaction is absorbed and emitted again by the gas in the cell, shining out as a range of wavelengths in the visible range. There is very little infrared. This is an important difference from fire that radically transforms the technology we use to harness it. Instead of a combustion chamber, we can collect the light with solar cells.
When Mills realized that the reaction could be harnessed for its light, he called it “a gift from Nature.” But it was also a gift from man. Over the decades that Mills developed the SunCell, our civilization invested a trillion dollars in the development of solar cell technology, driving down the cost by 98%, almost as if it was intended to be ready when the time was right.
The SunCell is an optical power source that produces light; an extraordinarily bright, white light, that closely resembles the spectrum of the Sun. It is like a Sun in a box.
Since the intensity of light is much greater than what you experience when you walk outside, solar panels need to be specifically designed for the increased intensity. Utilizing solar, a SunCell can produce 250 kW of power, or enough to power about 100 homes. This, from something the size of a refrigerator, and from a reaction cell about 1 liter in volume.
Allowing the majority of power produced in the SunCell to escape from the reaction chamber as light also solved a major engineering challenge of the SunCell.
The hydrino reaction is far more powerful than combustion. Each hydrogen atom releases over 100 times more energy by forming a hydrino than it would by forming a chemical bond with an oxygen atom during hydrogen-oxygen combustion. This gives the reactor a uniquely high output of power per unit volume (“power density”).
Try to imagine consolidating the engines of 100 cars under one hood, and you will intuitively appreciate the engineering challenges this creates: how to operate such a reactor without it melting down into a heap of slag metal. When the reaction chamber is transparent, the light easily escapes without being absorbed by the supporting components of the reactor.
But there is another challenge: the reaction requires some electrical power to be initiated, but the sheer intensity of the reaction destroys any solid bars of metal exposed to it. As a solution, Mills designed the reaction chamber (the bulb) with two legs, each of which is a pump tube that shoots a stream of liquid metal into the chamber. When the streams intersect, they complete the circuit to allow electricity to flow. The electrodes are not solid; they are liquid.
Where the streams meet, the reaction occurs, explosively vaporizing the metal into a cloud of particles. This produces a “plasma”—a hot, light-emitting gas of charged atomic or molecular species. The metal particles allow electricity to arc through it like a lightning bolt. It is like something out of a Ghostbusters movie.
This is not fire; it is hydrino power.
If the hydrogen used for the hydrino reaction is derived from water as fuel, the SunCell releases 2,460 MJ/kg by weight of water, which is 50 times more energy dense than a liter of gasoline intended for combustion, and 123 times more energy dense than wood.
The reaction also produces no carbon emissions or impactful pollution. Hydrino atoms form hydrino gas, a diatomic molecule just like ordinary hydrogen, but the molecular bond is incredibly strong. The molecule is physically much smaller than a conventional hydrogen gas molecule, and extremely inert.
Although it will introduce a new chemical species into our atmosphere, it is non-polluting. This is because hydrino gas is incredibly inert. But the gas does not hang around anyway; in fact, the Earth is simply not massive enough to trap hydrogen (or helium) in our atmosphere, so these molecules diffuse out into space.
If the SunCell is commercialized as a 250 kW unit, it will provide as much power as about half an acre of rooftop solar panels. But a matrix of cells could serve a region of millions.
With this kind of power, with very little required supporting infrastructure, we will enter a new industrial landscape in which small power stations or even units in individual homes power the grid. Long distance transmission lines will be obsolete, along with wind and solar farms, hydroelectric dams, and coal and natural gas fired central power plants. Unlike other renewables, the SunCell can be operated continuously and dispatched as needed to serve demand throughout the day, night, and in all seasons.
Water—when you include saline ocean water—is an inexhaustible resource; at our current energy use of 600 EJ/year, there is enough water in just the top 1 centimeter of the world’s oceans to power our civilization for 5,000 years. (We have put more water than this into the ocean during the last century by extracting it from underground reservoirs.)
The energy density of transportable water as fuel will enable new vehicles and technologies; and the small modular reactor size will transform the way power is generated and distributed around the world.
For the first time, the SunCell can provide a clean energy source that can outcompete fossil fuels in the marketplace and allow us to decarbonize the economy with breathtaking speed.
It will do so while lifting us all up. The SunCell will allow us to expand reliable electrification to the 700 million people still without. It will phase out the burning of dirty biomass fuels indoors, which causes severe respiratory diseases, and expand access to safe drinking water.
It will allow us to keep pace with increasing energy demand from industrializing countries and a growing world population that is rising in affluence. A growing population will also eat more, and the SunCell will allow us to power the production of fertilizer which feeds half the world.
The energy transition will be a second industrial revolution, in two decades it will replace two hundred years of fossil fuel infrastructure.
This is the end of fire.
IN THE DECADES SINCE Mills emerged, the gaze of scientists has been focused on mega-projects: multi-billion-dollar international collaborations to develop the first fusion reactor, supercolliders to unveil new particles, and telescopes to look deeper into space and time than ever before. But scientists have not yet acknowledged the discoveries of Randell Mills, and progress in science has been hampered by devotion to a quantum mechanical perspective on nature.
The hydrino, and the vast wealth of theory behind it, is labelled as ‘perpetual motion’ or ‘pseudoscience’ in the academic consciousness. The extraordinary amount of evidence published in the literature by Mills and his team, and by independent, respected scientists who have staked their reputations on the validity of their results, seems not to have reached their awareness.
This is not unprecedented; in the course of history, there are moments when one individual rises above their peers with a fresh understanding of nature, overturning years of thought, to usher in a new era of technological advance. Major discoveries are by nature disruptive; the more so, the more reluctantly we accept them. Yet these hard-wrought achievements become monuments to the success of our species.
Randell Mills’s discovery of the hydrino marks a scientific revolution in physics. It is an achievement in theoretical science, experimental science, and engineering. It is also a story of perseverance. Never before has one man driven a new basic understanding of the natural world to fruition as a major new technology in a single lifetime.
Working in relative isolation from mainstream scientific discourse, Mills’s new theory has allowed him to solve hundreds of problems in physics. It is a vast and sweeping revision to our knowledge comparable with that of Newton and Darwin; not merely an incremental advance, but a scientific revolution.
For over two decades, since the age of 17, I have sought to fully understand Mills’s ideas, driven by curiosity and fearlessness. I have lived in an alternate world to mainstream science, in which answers to many of the most exciting mysteries of our day (the successful resolution of even one of which would guarantee a Nobel Prize) were predicted years ago by Mills.
I have watched scientists slowly chisel away on these problems as if I were paging through a dated textbook after having seen the answer guide at the back.
Consider the “dark matter” problem: Astrophysicists are looking for a new kind of matter we can’t see, which likely makes up vast clouds around galaxies and may constitute 80% of all matter in the universe.
Hydrogen, the fuel of stars, is the most abundant atom in the universe, making up 90% of what we can see. Our galaxy is a large rotating disk of hydrogen.
That Mills has discovered a new kind of hydrogen has enormous implications. After it has formed, hydrogen in the hydrino state does not emit light like normal hydrogen, it is uniquely dark—although it can be traced if you know what to look for. Signatures seen in experiments match unidentified emission and absorption lines from space. This makes hydrino a serious contender for dark matter.
Consider the “solar neutrino” problem: Astrophysicists have observed a huge discrepancy between the theoretically predicted and observed number of neutrinos emitted by the Sun. As neutrinos are a byproduct of fusion deep within the core, this leaves 60% of the Sun’s radiated power unexplained.
The Sun is largely composed of hydrogen. The hydrino reaction may provide a pathway for fusion that balances this discrepancy, while also explaining explosive events on the Sun’s surface, and the mysterious heating of the Sun’s corona.
Consider the “dark energy” problem: In 1997, astronomers discovered that the universe is speeding up in its outward expansion. This has been a great cosmological mystery, as it was previously believed that the universe would be slowing down as it coasts outward from the Big Bang.
Yet two years prior, Mills extended his theory into particle physics and gravitation to reveal a new discovery about the nature of space. Succinctly stated, when a particle is born, space (or rather, “spacetime”) contracts, resulting in gravity. When a particle dies, or when mass is released as energy during any nuclear or chemical reaction, spacetime expands.
This modified Einstein’s General Relativity and predicted a new model of the universe in which it expands and contracts over trillion-year cycles, with no Big Bang—an oscillating universe. Mills published his theory in 1995.
Today, evidence is pouring in from the James Webb Space Telescope that reveals ancient structures predating the Big Bang, lending further support to Mills’s cosmology.
This same relationship between mass, energy, and spacetime allowed Mills to calculate the masses of fundamental particles, demonstrating that he had fully unified gravity with electromagnetism. This completed Einstein’s quest for the Grand Unified Theory of physics that applies over all scales—“from quarks to cosmos” as Mills likes to say. Poetically, the unified theory is not some new, weird physics, but derives from the equations of James Clerk Maxwell, written by candlelight, in 1865.
When the gaze of the world turns to Mills, it will find in his work a new scientific paradigm of thought, fully developed, like Athena from the head of Zeus; as well as a sensational technology, ready for market, as if brought down by Prometheus from the realm of the Gods.
It will trigger a new era defined by an upheaval in knowledge and technology, and it will complete a drama fated to be one of the great parables in the history of science.
Thoughts and questions? Join the conversation!
For further reading, this topic is covered in the forthcoming book: The End of Fire: Hydrino Energy and the Future of Physics by Brett Holverstott.
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