May/June 2011 Living Now
Greater than Fire: Hydrino as New Energy Source
by Jeane Manning and Joel Garbon
Forget the stereotype of inventors of revolutionary energy breakthroughs — they aren’t necessarily garage tinkerers or lacking academic credentials.
An outstanding example is Dr. Randell Mills of Princeton, New Jersey. He has a medical degree from Harvard and studied electrical engineering at Massachusetts Institute of Technology. Mills and his colleagues have had more than 80 peer-reviewed science papers published about his new chemical process that releases energy from hydrogen atoms without combustion and without any harmful radiation.
How could that affect our future? It could mean powering all industries, homes and vehicles with a source of clean fuel so abundant that it falls from the sky — water.
Mills’ company, BlackLight Power, refers to its inventions as being greater than fire. BlackLight Power has recently negotiated multiple commercial agreements that license power companies to use the BlackLight process to make heat for generating electricity. Mills has a further invention that produces electricity directly.
The route that brought this doctor into the alternative energy field began in a different type of field — growing crops on his father’s farm in Pennsylvania. Harvesting hay and corn from his own leased acreage while in high school taught young Mills to be resourceful and undaunted by setbacks. He also observed that nature is rich and complex but also understandable, predictable and unified.
The energetic young farmer was making money and had no plans to go to college, despite having been considered the class genius in high school. However, his outlook on life abruptly changed when he fell into a glass door. The accident, and the six hours of surgery needed to repair his hand and arm, shook up his thinking. While hospitalized from loss of blood and contemplating his mortality, he became determined to learn what he was doing on Earth — and how everything works.
Mills had enough profits from farming to pay his tuition at a local college, and he graduated at the head of his class. Taking as a role model the surgeon who had saved his life, he went on to Harvard Medical School. His plan, however, was to develop new medical technologies rather than practice medicine.
How did he leap from medical field inventing to the effort to save the world from the effects of polluting fuels? Mathematics was the bridge — Mills developed his own unified physics theory. To test his theory’s predictions, he experimented with ordinary water and a catalyst. Water is made of molecules, each binding an oxygen atom with two hydrogen atoms. His theory predicted that a hydrogen atom’s electron orbit could be tightened, forming a smaller atom that he calls a “hydrino,” with a consequent release of energy. His experiments validated this concept.
Although Mills’ theory is controversial, independent laboratories have replicated his findings. A Rowan University team found that his hydrogen-and-catalyst reaction produces far more heat than standard chemistry can account for. Other private laboratories have recently obtained similar results, calling their process “fractional hydrogen.”
Since the process releases about 200 times more energy than burning an equal amount of hydrogen gas, very little water is needed to provide the hydrogen. The company says only one-millionth of a liter of water per second is needed per kilowatt of electric power produced. The power density compares favorably to that of coal and nuclear fission, so the technology can be used for affordable heating, electricity generation and powering vehicles.
By-products of the BlackLight process include novel hydrogen compounds that have promise as useful new materials, perhaps preventing the need for destructive mining of various metals from the earth. Stable hydrino gas is also produced. Lighter than helium, it floats harmlessly up through the atmosphere if released.
Direct to Electricity
The company now has an exciting variant to its thermal process that is said to be more efficient and cost-effective. BlackLight’s catalyst-induced-hydrino-transition technology (CIHT) is a unique electrochemical cell that generates electricity directly from the reaction of hydrogen and catalyst. Capital costs are projected to be only about two percent of the cost of building conventional coal-fired or natural gas-fired power plants, because fossil fuel power plants must burn fuel, boil water and make steam that turns a turbine to produce electricity. The CIHT process is much more streamlined in comparison.
As with BlackLight’s thermal process, CIHT could allow efficient electrical generators to be built in a wide range of sizes, from small appliance to large power plant scale. For vehicle applications, Mills pictures a concept long-distance electric car whose drivetrain would be powered by a clean onboard process without need for the expensive, bulky batteries and supplemental internal combustion engine that are common in the current generation of electric vehicles.
The financial weight and political power of the dominant energy industries discourage some energy innovators but it hasn’t stopped Mills. He doesn’t report having suffered the physical harassment and threats that some inventors have endured. Opposition came instead in the form of public ridicule from the academic sector that relies on government grants. For instance, one physicist connected to the hot-fusion research establishment declared that science already knows everything about the hydrogen atom and that Mills’ work was junk science.
However, Mills has continued to forge ahead, advancing his very real technology. A more serious obstacle occurred when, needing the patent protection crucial to winning investors, there arose evidence of behind-the-scenes interference with Mills’ patent application.
Despite the interference, the inventive doctor found ways to raise funds for his energy research. Since Mills’ mathematics solves equations for figuring out the physical structure of electrons in atoms and molecules, a subsidiary of BlackLight sells a separate product that doesn’t threaten the energy establishment. Biological and industrial scientists buy that software product to map properties of various metals and chemicals.
Meanwhile, BlackLight Power plans to continue licensing its thermal energy process, which will hopefully soon result in large-scale retrofits of existing polluting power plants, while creating new green jobs for specialists and workers in building clean energy plants that use greater than fire technologies.
Jeane Manning and Joel Garbon are coauthors of 
Breakthrough Power: How Quantum-Leap New Energy Inventions Can Transform Our World
. Manning is also the author of The Coming Energy Revolution and Garbon is president of the New Energy Movement. Visit www.breakthroughpower.net and www.newenergymovement.org.