Episode #7: EcoRadio KC Interview

Today’s episode is a broad introduction to Randell Mills, the hydrino atom, and how the SunCell leverages hydrino power for energy production.

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EcoRadio KC is a magazine show, including live segments, prerecorded stories, and interviews for 90.1 KKFI Kansas City, with the goal to ensure listeners are aware of how we can create a sustainable present for a sustainable future. For this show (also available via kkfi.org) Brent Ragsdale speaks with his guest, Brett Holverstott, author, blogger and podcaster.

The following is an edited transcript of the interview:

BR: Welcome to EcoRadio KC. I'm your host, Brent Ragsdale. I am on a bit of a field trip this week; I'm out in Seattle visiting my parents, but I've taken the opportunity to meet up with someone whose book I’ve read, and we have similar interests. This is going to be on a topic about energy, a new energy technology. And it's something that I've wanted to cover for a long time. So I guess before I go much further, I want to welcome Brett Holverstott to the program. Brett, thanks for being here.

BH: Thank you. Glad to be here.

BR: All right. Well, we are both followers of a man named Randell Mills. And I have read your book on Randell Mills and his technology and his theories a couple of times. And I'm really excited to meet someone in person to talk about this.

So this is a new energy technology that we believe (I think if I can put words in your mouth) we believe is going to be the biggest thing since fire. How would you describe Mills as technology?

BH: Yeah, I say that it's going to bring on a second industrial revolution.

BR: All right. Wow. What's the name of your book, Brett?

BH: Well, the book was first published in 2016 as Randell Mills and the Search for Hydrino Energy. Since then, he has ‘found’ hydrino energy, and the title of the new book is The End of Fire: How the Hydrino is Sparking a Revolution in Physics and Clean Energy.

BR: Wonderful. And you have it done or about done?

BH: It's achingly close.

BR: Achingly close. All right. Well, what is a hydrino? I think maybe we should give a little explanation of what that is before we launch in about who Mills is, and how he came to this idea.

BH: Sure. So a “hydrino” atom is a hydrogen atom. And the hydrogen atom is the simplest atom in nature. It's just one electron orbiting one proton, and it naturally occurs as hydrogen gas, which is two atoms paired up. Hydrogen gas is not particularly common on Earth because it's a very light element, so it will easily escape out of the upper atmosphere. And until 20 or 30 years ago, no one had imagined that there was a new state of hydrogen in which the electron could be more tightly bound to the proton in the atom and in the resulting molecule. So to sum it up, it's a form of hydrogen gas that is extremely inert because the electron is bound really tight to the atom.

So to sum it up, the “hydrino” is a form of hydrogen atom and molecule that is extremely inert because the electron is bound really tight to the atom.

BR: So what we call the Standard Model of the hydrogen is about a 100-year-old model. They call it the Bohr model named after a scientist named Niels Bohr. And that is the one that we have in our heads where it looks like the electron is sort of like the Sun or sort of like the Earth going around the Sun. So it's a point that goes around a center of the atom. Is that correct?

BH: That's right. And the planetary model of the atom is the one we teach to school children and most of us walk around within our heads. Although in 1925, they kind of threw that idea away and invented a new theory of the physics of the atom called quantum mechanics that imagines the electron much more like a cloud around the nucleus.

BR: But there's an element of randomness, isn't there, in quantum mechanics? It's kind of like a probability cloud. You can't really know where anything is, but it's...

BH: That's true. And the reason for that is it's a mathematical model of what might be happening, but it's not a very clear model of the architecture of the atom itself. And to say that in the presence of, say, a PhD physicist, they may foam with the mouth a little bit. But if you ask them what the electron is, they don't have a clear picture in their mind like we do when we talk about a planetary model.

BR: Okay. So who is Randell Mills?

BH: So Mills was a kind of a boy genius. He grew up on a farm, was running his own farm through high school, went to college, turned out to be a star student, top of his class in chemistry as an undergraduate, went to Harvard to medical school, but with the intention of designing and engineering new medical technologies. And he made a pretty big splash there by moving quickly through his coursework, making a lot of friends who were influential scientists and engineers in Boston, had ideas for a lot of new interesting medical technologies.

And to fill up his course schedule, he also studied physics at MIT. And there he was exposed to some new research in electrodynamics that gave him this big idea for a new theory of the atom and its structure. This led to a prediction of the existence of these hydrino states of hydrogen.

And since then, he's spent several decades leading a team of scientists and engineers to do several things: First, to experimentally verify the existence of hydrinos, to characterize them analytically, to find out if they occur in nature (which they do extensively, especially in space); And second, to harness the chemical reaction that produces hydrinos as a potential new energy source.

Mills spent several decades leading a team of scientists and engineers to experimentally verify the existence of hydrinos, to characterize them analytically, to find out if they occur in nature, and to harness the chemical reaction that produces hydrinos as a potential new energy source.

BR: So with his theory, he went looking for the hydrino and then he went looking for ways to harness it?

BH: That's right.

BR: And this was about 30 years ago that he made his big discovery. Is that correct?

BH: That's right. And in those intervening years, he's been developing a new theory of nature, starting with the physics of the atom. Simultaneously, he's been leading this team of experimental scientists doing analytical chemistry. And also, he's been engineering this reaction into potential commercial technologies. So he's doing all three of those things in tandem. He's a theoretician, experimentalist, engineer, and probably future Nobel Prize winner.

BR: [Laughing] I think you're right. So I heard about Mills and his work probably 25 years ago. I think it probably around 1999. I was an engineer. I'd been out of school for 10 years, but you were in high school when you heard about it. Is that correct?

BH: That's right. I was 17.

BR: All right. And then that gave you the ability to go to college and study physics and ask questions pertinent to Mills' theory. Tell us about how that went.

BH: Well, I showed up on the first day of school at Reed College asking a lot of questions. And actually, I showed up at orientation, still deciding what my major was going to be, asking a lot of questions about Mills. And started to get (especially the chemistry department) to go back and start doing their research, so they were ready for me when school started with at least some cursory knowledge of who this Mills guy was and why this new student, this curious, intelligent-seeming new student was interested in the guy.

The chemistry department was always willing to engage with me, of course I knew almost nothing about science in detail at that point. But as the years went on, I occasionally brought it up, but mostly I was doing my own independent research into Mills's published papers, while I was simultaneously learning the chemistry and the physics. So I was taking (actually, I was double majoring) in chemistry and physics. When I brought Mills' work to the physics professors, they were much less interested in even having a conversation about it, although I had a couple of conversations that I could talk about.

BR: Well, I understand that since quantum mechanics came to be a thing, there's sort of a saying that you tell the freshmen that are learning physics to “shut up and calculate.” Yeah. I think that there's a bit of things that you have to take on faith in science now because it's a difficult thing; they aren't really grounded in physical things that make a lot of just intuitive sense. Is that a correct statement?

BH: That's right. And I'm not trying to necessarily criticize the state of science as it exists today, but when you're a young scientist learning quantum mechanics, it never really makes sense, but you learn to become comfortable with the fact that it doesn't make sense. And by the time you've mastered all of the mathematics necessary to do quantum mechanical calculations, you've forgotten that physics at that point is about real objects in nature that behave in orderly ways. You start to only see the mathematics and getting the answer right at the end of the exam displaces your actual conscious awareness of physical nature. And if you step back and ask yourself what is an atom in quantum mechanics, and you momentarily just try to let yourself reconnect with the natural world, you'll quickly find that quantum mechanics doesn't have an answer for that question.

And by the time you've mastered all of the mathematics necessary to do quantum mechanical calculations, you've forgotten that physics is about real objects in nature that behave in orderly ways.

BR: Yeah. And isn't that a famous quote of Einstein that he said he would be satisfied to just really understand the hydrogen atom?

BH: Yeah, Einstein was very much opposed to quantum mechanics, but never quite articulated the right reason for that. And I believe the reason why we should reject quantum mechanics is because it's just a terrible theory that makes no sense; it's extremely poor at making any kind of calculation or prediction of nature. And my real criticism of the academic establishment right now is that they lie to you and tell you that it's an extremely effective theory at calculating and predicting, which is absolutely not true.

BR: Because they've kind of added constants and fudge factors to get the theory to fit the observable data in terms of binding energies and things like that in chemistry that you can actually physically measure? Is that what you're talking about?

BH: Yeah, I mean, much like a student of science, you know, they've deceived themselves into accepting that what they can do with the theory is what you should be able to do with a theory. I believe that a theory of nature on the atomic level should be able to predict the result of an interaction between two electrons. Quantum mechanics cannot do that. And as a result, the only problem that quantum mechanics can solve well, if you're talking about the architecture of our world - of nature - is the hydrogen atom, which only has one electron. As soon as you start to add electrons, quantum mechanics is unable to make good predictions of the energy states (the stationary energy states) of atoms.

BR: Whereas the application of Mills' theory is much more accurate.

BH: Yes, and it's so much more accurate, it's mind-boggling. It's not just accurate in its predictions, but the predictions that it can make are staggering. We're talking hundreds of atoms, thousands of states, thousands of molecules, predictions made with simple equations that are not conjured from complicated math. These are simple equations from force balances between electrons. The theory makes it easy to solve all these things that physicists have been unable to calculate for almost 100 years.

BR: So when you were at Reed College, you had an internship with Mills and his company Brilliant Light Power. Is that correct? So you went from the West Coast all the way back to New Jersey, where their facility is.

BH: Yeah. And, you know, I just started off as a laboratory technician, you know, got my fingers into things going on in the laboratory. Was doing some analytical work, taking spectral data on samples, running experiments. And then over time, I began to do more support of the theoretical work that Mills was also doing. And at that time, he was especially getting into molecular physics, and we ended up doing a lot of visualizations of molecules. Ultimately, we built a whole new molecular modeling platform based on his theory. I was on site in New Jersey for only like a year and a half, but I came back to finish my undergraduate degree and I continued working with Mills remotely for several more years.

BR: So that software is called Millsian, is that correct?

BH: That's true. And it's just kind of like a proof of concept. It was never really converted into a commercial piece of software.

BR: Okay. Well, this might be a good place for us to take our first break. I know this is a little different than our normal topics for EcoRadio, but I think if you bear with us, you're going to hear just how exciting this could be potentially for our world and our environment. So again, I'm Brent Ragsdale, I'm with Brett Holverstott, and we'll be right back.

[Intermission at 15:31]

BR: Welcome back. Again, I'm Brent Ragsdale and this is Brett Holverstott and we are talking about a new potential science and an energy source based on “hydrinos.” Okay, so we were talking about your background and going to school and learning about physics and chemistry and then getting an internship with Randell Mills and his company Brilliant Light Power in New Jersey.

Maybe we should take a little step back and talk about Mills's journey. After he had this big epiphany when he was still in school and he was doing his final year at MIT, he was exposed to the work of his professor Herman Haus, who wrote a paper that he gave to Randell Mills as a student. Mills recognized it and applied it and created a whole theory based on that and many other things. How long did it take Mills before he was ready to talk to the world about that? And did he write it up, like have a paper that he completed before he started talking about it?

BH: So in the few years after school, Mills had a lot of projects going on for new medical technologies. And some of these things he would engineer and build himself using spare parts that he could get. So when he had the idea for a new theory of nature, obviously that involved some sit-down theoretical work. I believe he spent about a year developing the theory before he began an experimental program. After the first year of experimental work, which was done in small dewers in his kitchen sink with a friend helping (you know, kind of just real like garage style work)…

BR: So a dewer would be like an insulated carafe or something like that?

BH: Right. Yeah. So small reaction cells kind of doing-it-yourself. They felt like they had experimentally confirming results that showed excess energy being released from hydrogen. And they went public with that announcement, I believe in April of 1991.

BR: And the timing wasn't stellar on that because of another announcement that was made at about the same time that had to do with the “cold fusion” thing that people have heard about. Is that correct?

BH: Yeah, so very shortly before that, some experimentalists at the University of Utah had been kind of strong-armed into an early announcement of a potential new energy source they called “cold fusion.” And what that means is: “fusion” is a physical process in which you combine two atoms to make one atom. This is usually done at very high temperatures, very high pressures. It's the process that occurs in the Sun. These scientists claimed that they had achieved this process in a benchtop experiment, which, if true, would mean that you could very easily commercialize it as a new energy source. It would totally change the world.

Unfortunately, they made this announcement before they had done important scientific verifications that would normally be required. And after the initial excitement about the idea, there was a lot of criticism about the quality of the scientific work. And it fell apart like a house of cards.

BR: Yeah. And unfortunately, the test apparatus that Mills was using to show that he was getting excess energy (from what he theoretically thought was taking hydrogen at a ground state and dropping its electron to be closer to the center of the atom [creating a hydrino atom] and releasing energy) his apparatus looked a lot like the cold fusion apparatus at that time.

BH: Yeah, they're both basically cells filled with water. In order to get hydrogen from the water, you apply an electric current to the cell and you split the water into hydrogen and oxygen through “electrolysis.” So it was an electrolysis cell. And that was also the cell that was being used at the University of Utah.

BR: So there are a lot of similarities. But Mills started with a theoretical framework that made him want to design experiments to go see if he could prove his theory wrong or see some new phenomenon that might give his theory credence.

BH: Mills was designing his electrolysis cell to perform a chemical reaction with hydrogen, whereas the scientists at the University of Utah were trying to get a nuclear reaction to perform. So there were differences in the setup of the cell, but they're very similar.

BR: That was about the time that I heard about Mills' work, I think. And it seemed like he spent about 10 years doing similar types of experiments and getting more and more power out, and then having more and more analysis of the hydrino product of the reaction so that he could try to prove that he had, in fact, created something different than hydrogen.

BH: Yeah, so the first decade of experimental work was largely done in these electrolysis-style cells. And there was still a lingering community of scientists who were following the cold fusion development, and some of those scientists got interested in what Mills was doing, became involved. There were some papers published by these cold fusion researchers talking about Mills's work. But they also had a different theory for what was going on. They still believed in a nuclear hypothesis for the excess heat being produced by these experiments. But Mills's cells were much more successful and reliable at producing heat. However, they weren't viewed by the scientific community as very promising because of this loose association and confusion with what was happening in the cold fusion community. If Mills had emerged with this new technology and this new chemical reaction without any of that historical context, he might have been taken very seriously.

BR: And also his theory is in direct opposition to the mainstream quantum mechanics. So it was more threatening, and it was easier for people to ignore him because of that as well.

BH: That's true. If you walk into a room and say: “Hey, I have a whole new theory of nature. And by the way, I have a promising new energy technology.” It's hard to not just like laugh out loud in disbelief at the possibility that something so amazing.

BR: …That one man could have come up with something like that. So fast forward to about 10 years ago, he made a big breakthrough, did he not?

BH: Yeah, so after these electrolysis cells that were water-based, the next 10 or 15 years, his research group was experimenting with light-emitting plasma cells, so these would often take place in a glass cell, you'd see a light emission when the reaction happened, you'd see heat emissions, and you can take all kinds of interesting data from what's going on in those cells.

Eventually, they discovered something really important and fundamental about the nature of this chemical reaction: it's an “electrochemical” reaction; it really needs a high amount of electric current pumped through this plasma in order to keep the reaction going really strong. So for 20 or 30 years, these reaction cells had generated heat and light, but not at a sufficiently intense level to be useful as a commercial new power source.

But after they discovered that putting a high amount of current through the reaction material, that that would make the reaction go to completion, they actually got an explosive reaction. Starting with small capsules of material and pumping electric current through it, they were able to get explosive reactions in which the hydrino reaction was going all the way to completion in a very short period of time. Basically, it was a small bomb.

BR: And when it would explode, it would give off a “plasma.” Is that correct, Richard? Explain to the listeners what a plasma is.

BH: A “plasma” is a hot gas that has had some of its electrons stripped off of the atoms, and as a result, they're flying around in this gas, emitting light, recapturing and re-ionizing their electrons. A plasma is the state of matter that the Sun (and the Sun's atmosphere) is in.

BR: Okay, in the initial cells they realized that, as it was doing the hydrino transition, [they] had a tendency to glow a little bit. That was in the ultraviolet spectrum, so it was a little bit of a purplish glow. But that would then, in my mind, it's sort of like if you're cooking over a gas stove and you have the flame really low, you just see a little bit of a blue flame, versus, what's happening in your car when the spark plug ignites the gasoline and it all explodes all at once.

BH: Right. And I should have also said that fire is a plasma state as well. The kind of light being emitted by Mills's cells is fundamentally different, though, then the kind of light being emitted by a campfire.

A campfire is emitting light in a range of frequencies, some are visible (we can see them) but most of the energy is released in the infrared wavelengths, which we can't see, but we can feel it on our skin as heat. Infrared light is very good at being absorbed by a gas very quickly to do mechanical work, which is why a car engine utilizes a combustion chamber to spin the engine. Infrared light converts very quickly into heat, which converts very quickly into work.

Some of the light being produced by Mills' cells is in the visible wavelengths, but a lot of it is in the higher energy frequencies that we can't see, including the ultraviolet, extreme ultraviolet, and even some x-ray wavelengths as well. And in a plasma, you'll lose some of the higher frequency light, and it will emit primarily in the visible range. So just as with every new energy source, you actually need a unique prime mover to convert that energy into useful work. So in the case of Mills' latest cells, the plasma is emitting an extremely intense light in the visible wavelengths, and instead of using a car engine, you want to use solar panels to capture that energy.

Just as with every new energy source, you need a unique prime mover to convert energy into useful work. In the case of Mills' cells, the plasma is emitting an extremely intense light in the visible wavelengths, so you can use solar panels to capture that energy.

BR: Yeah, so before we talk about how his new “SunCell” device works, let's sort of finish out - so 10 years ago, he started publishing some videos of the tests that they were doing, and I remember that one of the devices (so you talked about the high current that was required) that's basically what a spot welder in a metal shop would do. It's not much voltage, but it's a lot of current, and then if you run that through two pieces of metal, it will get hot enough to physically melt those two pieces together.

So there's another device that is sort of a rotary welder where you could put two pieces of thin pieces of metal through there and make a continuous welded seam. And I remember seeing a video where they had a carrier sheet that had the catalyst material and running that through and it was making little explosions. That was the earliest one that I saw. And I thought, hey, this is something different. He's on to something.

BH: Right. Once you have these little explosions from these small pellets of material, the trick then is how do you convert that into a continuous energy source? And so some of those early prototypes were trying to rapidly explode a large number of small pellets in rapid succession in order to produce enough light to power solar panels.

BR: Yeah. Yeah. Yes, I remember that. They were trying to get it to be a constant light and then have a solar panel nearby so that they could light up a light bulb or something like that.

BH: Right. And they experimented with pellets, powders, and slurries before they began experimenting with molten silver that had been infused with water vapor. And that's when they had another important breakthrough about how to create a continuous reaction. The silver performed very well for sustaining this plasma. And from that point on, all of their reactor concepts involved molten metal in some way in order to deliver electricity to the reaction.

BR: And wasn't that because any electrode material that he used would get so hot that it would vaporize? Wasn't that part of the reason? To solve that, he came up with the idea of pumping the molten metals to be the electrodes?

BH: Yeah, the electrodes - even those made of molybdenum, which have I think like a 10,000 degree vaporization point - after only 15 or 20 seconds of running, these electrodes would be destroyed as if eaten away by an army of ants. And the reason for that is that this is a chemical reaction that's 100 to 200 times more powerful than what's happening in the engine of your car. And when you have that much power being released in such a small area, it tends to destroy everything that it touches.

BR: So according to Mills, the hydrino reaction is... about 200 times stronger than combustion. So if you had a certain amount of hydrogen and you burned that hydrogen, you'd get a certain amount of energy. But if you had that amount of hydrogen and you were able to convert it through his process into the lower energy state (hydrino) it would give off 200 times more energy. Is that correct? Which is less than at the range of a nuclear reaction, but much greater than fire, such that you could potentially make a device that would run a car from coast to coast on a liter of water.

[Author’s follow-up addition: Using water as fuel, the hydrino reaction would provide 2,450 MJ/kg (approximately 50 times the energy density of gasoline) allowing 5 liters of water in a hydrino powered car to travel 5,000 km, approximately the width of the United States.]

Maybe this is a good time for us to take our second break and we'll get into how the SunCell works when we come back.

[Intermission at 31:20]

Welcome back to EcoRadio. I'm Brent Ragsdale. My guest is Brett Holverstott. He's the author of a book: Randell Mills and the Search for Hydrino Energy, and he's got a new edition coming out shortly.

We are talking about the scientist Randell Mills and his discovery, of what we believe to be, earth-shattering new technology that's going to really change the world. Let's talk about the “SunCell” device that Mills is prototyping right now. and how it works and kind of where he is with it.

BH: So the Sun Cell is like an oversized light bulb. It has a glass bulb where the reaction happens, where you generate this hot light-emitting plasma, and it has two supporting legs. The reaction in the bulb is very high energy density, which means it's generating a lot of energy in a very small amount of space, and it requires electricity to be initiated.

Putting electricity into this bulb, however, is very difficult if the energy coming out of it is so intense, because it will quickly melt down any solid electrodes that you expose to this plasma. So as a solution to that, Mills designed a way two inject two streams of liquid metal into the bulb [from the legs]. The electricity flows along these streams. Where they intersect in the middle, the current can flow through the reactor and you get this explosion happening in the bulb. It kind of looks like something out of Ghostbusters, these two streams coming together, and the metal instantly vaporizes into a gas, and you get this very intense light-emitting plasma.

BR: But that metal isn't consumed. It drops back down and is reused, repumped again. And it's pumped with a mechanism - you wouldn't think that we could pump a liquid metal (silver, that's hot enough to be liquid) but there's actually a way to do that.

BH: Yeah, a really basic way using the laws of electrodynamics that allows you to move that liquid metal [called an “electromagnetic pump.”]

BR: Okay, so he's got this big light bulb. It's making this bright light. How is he going to convert that into a usable power?

BH: Like I said before, the light frequencies are in the visible range, so they are exactly what our solar panels have been designed to capture. The spectrum of light from the sun cell closely resembles that of the sun. So the concept is to surround this light bulb with solar panels and generate power. It's a sun in a box.

The SunCell Prototype. Illustration by Matt Schmidt.

BR: And we do have (in addition to the normal kinds of solar panels that we see on people's roofs or in solar farms that are starting to pop up everywhere) they have some installations in the world where they use a series of mirrors that can track the sun and focus that light onto the solar panels. And so that's a “concentrated solar panel.” And that's actually what they're using. So these are commercially available concentrator solar panel kinds of technology?

BH: Yeah, and this has been an engineering problem that they've been working on for several years. I'm not sure what they're going to end up with, but there was a turn back to traditional silicon solar panels as a potentially better solution. So the light being produced by the sun cell is much more intense than natural sunlight, But the question is: what's the best kind of solar panel to use in that application that won't overheat in those conditions?

BR: Okay. All right, so how big is the device?

BH: I think by the time you package it all up, it won't be much bigger than a refrigerator.

BR: Just a normal refrigerator in your house?

BH: Yeah, the cell, the volume of the bulb itself, I believe, is one liter.

BR: Okay, and what kind of power wattage is he looking to make with each of those units?

BH: I'm not sure exactly what they're going to end up with, but I believe they're talking about something on the order of a 250 kilowatt device.

BR: If this succeeds, what impact is it going to have, say, on the energy transition and our build out of wind turbines and solar panels and grid batteries for storing that so that we can have 24-7 power on our grid?

BH: Well, honestly, it's a dream come true as a power source because it's clean, it doesn't produce any carbon, it only produces a very inert, tightly bound form of hydrogen gas.

BR: And what happens to that gas?

BH: Hydrogen gas doesn't remain in Earth's atmosphere. It tends to diffuse into the outer atmosphere and then into space. Planets like Saturn and Jupiter are much more massive, and they're actually able to trap gases like helium and hydrogen in their atmospheres. But the Earth is not. So the only byproduct of this reaction is an inert gas that doesn't stick around. And the only thing consumed by this reaction is ordinary water.

It's a dream come true as a power source because it's clean, it doesn't produce any carbon, it only produces an inert gas that diffuses into space. And the only thing consumed by this reaction is ordinary water.

BR: So is that going to consume enough water that that will be an issue, hundreds of years from now?

BH: I've done some calculations on this for my book. The energy density of hydrino as a power source is enormous in comparison to fossil fuels. And as a result, you'd only need to use the top one centimeter of water in the world's oceans at today's energy consumption rate to power civilization for 5,000 years.

BR: Wow. At today's rate. And there is a limiting factor to how much energy we can produce on planet because all of that energy degrades to waste heat eventually. You use it somewhere and thermodynamics says that that energy won't be destroyed. It'll have to be radiated off the earth.

BH: That's true. But most of the heat-causing climate change is natural cycles that we can't control once we put carbon in the atmosphere.

BR: And also electrifying would produce a lot less waste heat. So for a typical internal combustion car, about 80% of that energy in the gasoline turns into heat and 20% moves you down the road. Whereas an electric motor car would be much more efficient.

BH: That's true, but ultimately all the energy is released as heat into the environment, 100%.

You know, we actually didn't finish talking about kind of the energy impact. So because the hydrino reactor, the SunCell, is so small and produces so much energy, there's a good chance that we can decentralize it across the landscape and dismantle high voltage transmission infrastructure. It's also very cheap power in comparison to fossil fuels. I've been calculating that it could be [Correction: 1/10th - 1/100th] the cost of burning natural gas, which means the impact on all existing energy sources would be total and absolute. It would displace every other energy source that exists. Because it's a non-variable, sustainable technology that is inexpensive, non-polluting, and doesn't require you to mine resources like fossil fuels.

It would displace every other energy source that exists. It's a non-variable, sustainable technology that is inexpensive, non-polluting, and doesn't require you to mine resources like fossil fuels.

BR: And it's controllable like a power plant is in that it's not like intermittent power that like a solar panel, that only works during the daytime and only on days that aren't cloudy. But it's something that you can turn on and off at will.

BH: Right. The first industrial revolution (the mining of coal in England and Ireland) ended up multiplying our energy use by a factor of about 20. I believe that the energy transition to hydrino power will do something very similar. It'll multiply our energy use while making it significantly cheaper for both “first world” countries as well as developing nations. I think it's fair to call it not just the “energy transition,” but a second industrial evolution.

The first industrial revolution multiplied our energy use by a factor of 20. The transition to hydrino power will do something similar while making it significantly cheaper for both first world countries as well as developing nations. It is not just an energy transition, but a second industrial revolution.

BR: Yeah, excellent. Well, I'm not sure we'll have time, but let's talk a little bit about space. You wrote a series of articles on Medium a few years ago, and now you're publishing a podcast and a blog on Substack. Tell us the name of that.

BH: “Profane Science”

BR: So profane is the opposite of sacred. That would be my definition. A good title, since this flies in the face of the science that seems to be sacred in terms of quantum mechanics. One of those articles on Medium, you talked about the question: Why is the surface of the sun as hot as it is? One potential answer could be that in addition to the fusion process that's happening inside of it, there could also be some hydrino transition happening on the surface. Is that correct?

BH: That's right. So when Mills began looking for evidence of hydrino in nature, he began to identify spectral lines coming from the Sun as well as interstellar space that had hydrino signatures. And it makes a lot of sense. I mean, the sun is almost all hydrogen and it has the same conditions that are required to enable the hydrino reaction. So the Sun is hot, it's high pressure, it has a lot of magnetic field lines all tangled up around the surface. It has discharges of electricity that are happening all over the surface. And we see these flashes of light coming from the surface of the Sun that are incredibly bright, very localized, and could very well be explosive bursts of hydrino formation.

There's also this long-standing mystery as to why the atmosphere of the Sun, called the “corona,” appears to be so hot. It actually appears to be hotter than the surface of the Sun itself. But astrophysicists weren't aware that there was potentially a chemical reaction with hydrogen that could release very high energy light. So if this very high energy light is being absorbed by the atmosphere around the Sun, it excites atoms to very high energy states, and then the spectral lines we see from that… you can interpret them one of two ways: either as being caused by a very hot gas, 200 times hotter than the surface of the sun, or you could interpret it as a photonic excitation caused by very high energy light. So Mills' discovery of the hydrino atom explains several simultaneous mysteries surrounding the Sun: the source of explosive outbursts on the surface, and the temperature of the corona.

BR: Let's talk about maybe the biggest mystery in cosmology: the missing mass in the universe [“dark matter”]. Talk about that.

BH: For decades, astronomers have been discovering that galaxies are spinning too fast for how much matter actually appears to be in them, matter that we can see through visible light like stars. And there's been a lot of speculation on what the unseen matter could be. But we've made a lot of progress in knowing where it is, and what kind of matter it has to be, and how it's distributed throughout galaxies.

It's important to remember that galaxies are the universe is almost all hydrogen. Every other element is basically a trace element. Our galaxy is a big spinning disk of hydrogen, and we've just discovered a new state of hydrogen in the universe. There's a good chance that all of the missing remaining matter that exists in these large clouds (that are totally surrounding galaxies) is hydrino. And we see some spectral lines in the extreme ultraviolet wavelengths that match hydrino transitions.

We also see absorption lines in space that appear to be caused by diffuse gas that seems to be in every direction that we look. These are called “diffuse interstellar bands.” And Mills is now matching those lines to absorption lines for hydrino as well. So it's quite possible that hydrino gas constitutes 80% of all of the mass of in our galaxy, and the universe as a whole. It's out there in space, diffuse enough that it's not seen. Hydrino gas also emits light in different ways - it doesn't reflect light in the same way that hydrogen gas does, you but you can see spectral lines when it's being formed.

Our galaxy is a big spinning disk of hydrogen, and we've just discovered a new state of hydrogen in the universe. So it's quite possible that hydrino gas constitutes 80% of all of the mass of in our galaxy, and the universe as a whole.

BR: Okay. So if people have interest in this, Brett, where could they get your book? What's it called? What's your presence on the web?

BH: I encourage you to check out the Profane Science Substack blog and podcast. We are also on Spotify. The 2016 book is still on print - it's called Randell Mills and the Search for Hydrino Energy. And there'll be a forthcoming edition for that probably in 2025. My new landing page is endoffire.com.

BR: Okay. Well, thank you very much. I'd sure love some feedback from people in Kansas City, what you think of this. This has been a passion of mine for a long time. It was fun for me to finally sit down and talk to someone who actually knows about Randell Mills and what a hydrino is.

I will say too, to add a little bit more credence to all of this, I was able to visit Mills in his laboratory in New Jersey about three years ago. And I saw them doing tests that day with a SunCell prototype, making the reaction, making the light. They were doing spectral measurements so that they could give that to the solar panel manufacturers and try to spec the right kinds of solar panels to convert that energy into electricity. So it all matched up with just the things that he's been saying he's doing. So just can't wait for this really to happen, see him get his Nobel Prize and get to say that I interviewed Brett first. Okay, thanks a lot, Brett.

BH: Yeah, thank you.

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For further reading, this topic is covered in the forthcoming book: The End of Fire: how the hydrino is sparking a revolution in physics and clean energy by Brett Holverstott.