TESTING VALIDATES HYDRINO THEORY

BRADENTON, Fla., Dec. 18, 2010 -- A remarkable new energy source from fractional hydrogen will allow a gallon of ordinary water to become the energy equivalent of 200 barrels of oil, a team of physicists working near the onetime laboratories of Thomas Edison and Albert Einstein are saying.

"With further optimization," Dr. K.V. Ramanujachary of Rowan University in Glassboro, N.J., says, "there is no doubt that this technology will present an economically viable and environmentally benign alternate to meet global energy needs. If advanced to commercialization, it would be one of the most profound developments ever.”

The method of electricity production allows the fuel to reproduce itself by diverting part of the energy output to a catalyst that is then regenerated so fuel is only needed once. Using the process, about 10 100-watt bulbs could be lit 24 hours a day for a penny.

Hydrogen atoms of water can release an enormous amount of energy. Now BlackLight is promising an engine technology aimed at driving a car 5,000 miles on a gallon of water.

And if solar flares over the next 10 years have the power to blackout thousands of homes, as the National Oceanography and Atmospheric Administration has warned, the distributed power of the new cells could keep America lit up.

A working model is promised for 2011. Until it appears and independent laboratories confirm BlackLight's claims, most scientists will not accept such unorthodox technology, especially if it is based on classical rather than quantum physics. BlackLight's research has also been hampered in the past by its close ties to Rowan University, where several of its engineers have worked.

But the greater problem for BlackLight may be the oil companies and conventional utilities that will be displaced, if not destroyed, by hydrino technology. Even though the cells as described would collectively save homeowners and manufacturers trillions in electricity costs and generate many millions of jobs, it is also thought to be the target of a concerted foreign industrial espionage campaign.

The company, which has never tried to go public, keeps a low profile and has mounted a remarkably mundane website full of small type and dense physics with little appeal to readers. Even the weekly Cranbury Press has no mention of the company in its search database, yet there are thousands of search results on Google.

Ironically, the BlackLight Power facilities are located in Cranbury, N.J., a small town 8 miles from the Princeton University labs where Albert Einstein once toiled and 37 miles from the West Orange, N.J., laboratories of Thomas Edison.

"We have demonstrated the ability to produce electrical power using chemical systems for the direct production of electric power from the conversion of hydrogen to hydrinos, a more stable form of hydrogen,” said Dr. Randell Mills, chairman, CEO and president of BlackLight Power.

Working with a team headed by Dr. Alexander Bykanov at Harvard's Smithsonian Center for Astrophysics under contract with GEN3 Partners, the device showed hydrogen spectral emissions below 80 nanometers, the previously known "ground state" of hydrogen. Scientists formerly believed there could be no parts of the hydrogen atom smaller than the atom itself.

"This is decisive evidence of the existence of hydrinos as Dr. Randell Mills theoretically predicted," the BlackLight Power press release said. Hydrinos are a fractional element of hydrogen that skeptics in the world of quantum physics previously said could not exist.

“This is smoking-gun evidence of the existence of hydrinos," Dr. Mills said. "The light signature observed is from pure hydrogen and exists at a much higher energy level than deemed possible for this element in any known form.”

In a joint statement, Dr. Bykanov and Dr. Sam Kogan, chief operating officer of Boston-based GEN3 Partners, a company that evaluates new technologies and helps bring them to market, said "[BlackLight Power's] spectral results were identically [and] independently reproduced, and we could find no conventional explanation for the emission of bright light from hydrogen in this very high energy region. We believe that this confirms hydrino emission.”

Acceptance of Mills' ideas is largely the product of a battle between Einstein's old-fashioned "classical" physics and the newfangled "quantum" ideas of physicists like the late Richard Feynman.

One critic has been Stephen Chu, the Chinese-American physicist who was won the Nobel Prize and later became President Obama's Secretary of Energy. Chu urged investors to avoid BlackLight Power in 1999, saying he "felt sorry" for them. As many as seven Chinese-American physicists have co-authored some of the more than 80 peer-reviewed scientific journal articles published by and about Mills and his work, however. Mills could not be reached for comment on this article. His corporate public relations firm, the giant Hill & Knowlton, has not responded to emails in the past, and a Hill & Knowlton spokesperson, Milly Coleman, had her calls forwarded to voicemail Friday.

The company published its latest findings in the peer-reviewed International Journal of Hydrogen, and issued the news release Nov. 29 about the new power source, a system they call Catalyst Induced Hydrino Transition, or CIHT, that produces electricity directly. Others seeking a more palatable name have called it "Electricity from Collapsing Hydrogen Orbits,” or ECHO.

The company, funded with $70 million in investments by three large venture capital firms, says the technology allows an electric car, the size and weight of a Prius and costing about $9,000 to build, to travel more than 5,000 miles on a gallon of water. No combustion engine is required. A former chief of staff of the United States Air Force and a former CEO of Westinghouse Corp. have at various times sat on the company's board.

At least five American utilities, a Washington, D.C., energy broker and multinational firms in Italy and Holland are hoping to deploy the hydrino generators to produce an amount of electricity equivalent to that needed to run 1 million American homes - for as little as one cent per kilowatt.

An expanded team of scientists and engineers at Rowan University say they completed a thorough year-long series of additional testing of the thermal systems following the announcement and release of earlier validations, performed in October 2008 and August 2009. Using BLP’s proprietary solid-fuel chemistry, which is capable of continuous regeneration, they independently formulated and tested fuels that they found could generate on-demand energy greater than that of combustion but at the far lower power levels of kilowatts.

"When using BLP's chemical process, Rowan professors reported a net energy gain of up to 6.5 times the maximum energy potential of these materials from known chemical reactions," the release said. The Rowan team included Dr. Ramanujachary, who is Rowan University Meritorious Professor of Chemistry and Biochemistry, assistant professor of chemistry Dr. Amos Mugweru, professor of engineering Dr. John L. Schmalzel, P.E., and Dr. Peter Jansson P.E., asssociate professor of engineering at Rowan.

"In additional independent tests conducted over the last 12 months, involving 13 solid fuel mixtures made by us from commercially-available chemicals and confirmed by multiple analyses, our team of engineering and chemistry professors, staff and students at Rowan University has independently and consistently generated energy in excesses ranging from 1.3 times to 6.5 times the maximum theoretical heat available through known chemical reactions,” Dr. Ramanujachary said

Compared to thermal-based systems, Mills says, "[CIHT] produces electricity without requiring enormous thermally-driven mechanical generators." The power units would be distributed to individual homes, where they could power not just the home home but a neighborhood. The small unit in the car could even be hooked up to the house to power it.

Rather than relying on a giant utility, the units would make each home and neighborhood autonomous - "off the grid," as green energy activists like to say. That will make adoption of the units a quicker process, Mills says.

"Consequently, more rapid dissemination is expected by deploying many autonomous distributed units that circumvent the huge barriers of entry into the power markets such as developing and building massive billion-dollar power plants with their associated power distribution infrastructure," Mills said. "This is especially true in emerging markets.”

BlackLight Power focuses on using CIHT units to produce power to ultimately sell directly to consumers under power purchase agreements.

"The business plan is akin to that of solar leasing, but the costs are potentially vastly cheaper, and the systems may be deployable for essentially all applications of all scales untethered to the Sun or the grid, or as in the case of fuel cells and cars, a fuel supply," Dr. Mills said.

"To realize how transformational this technology will be, imagine that an electric car can travel over 5,000 miles on the hydrogen energy from a gallon of water without any pollution whatsoever. The power source can then be lifted out and plugged into your electrical panel to power your home with enough power to spare to also power your neighborhood,” Mills added.

Some of those hoping to exploit the new technology are already thinking ahead. "BLP’s breakthrough CIHT technology will allow us to become a major green-power producer for the DC metro area while enabling dramatic savings and unheard of independence," said John E. Akridge III, chairman and owner of Washington, D.C.,-based Akridge Energy.

"It is ideal for our needs across the full spectrum of our applications: powering apartment complexes, commercial offices, retail outlets, and mixed-use projects.” Akridge said. His firm, a BlackLight Power licensee that owns numerous buildings in Washinton, D.C., "intends to deploy distributed-scale CIHT electric power units at commercial real estate properties, sell electricity to its tenants and eventually into the local electric grid," he said.

At Rowan University, where much of the validation of the technology was done, the chairman of the college's physics department is emphatic about the process.

"The chemicals used in CIHT technology, similar to those used in thermal and chemical cells, were separately, thoroughly and diligently validated over the past three years by a team at Rowan University that included myself," Dr. K.V. Ramanujachary said. "Since the measurements on CIHT are electrical versus calorimetric, there can be no dispute over the power and the energy balance," he said.

AR Correspondent Joe Shea can be reached at amreporter @ aol.com. Mark Goldes contributed additional reporting on solar flares.

Reactions from various scientists A small group of experimental scientists from NASA and the US Navy research labs have expressed mild support for the claims of Blacklight Power.[2] However, Mills has met general skepticism in the academic community since the founding of BLP in 1991. CQM and hydrinos have been doubted by mainstream physicists who consider it to be pseudoscience. These physicists reject it due to its inconsistencies with mainstream literature concerning quantum theory.[2][5][6][9][14] Although Mills has published CQM theory papers in peer-reviewed journals, he has published only in those dealing with speculative work.[5] The most visible critic of Mills' theories has been Robert L. Park, the spokesman for the American Physical Society, insists that Mills has failed to address several deep flaws in the theory.[2] A 2005 evaluation by Andreas Rathke claims there are "severe inconsistencies" in Mills' theory, including a lack of "solutions that predict the existence of hydrinos."[14] Rathke concludes that Mills' equations are not Lorentz invariant, a requirement of any theory that explains the behavior of particles moving close to the speed of light.[15] Mills responded to Rathke with an article (listed as "in press" on the BlackLight Power website) claiming Rathke made nine major errors in his analysis.[16][17] Jan Naudts of the University of Antwerp argues that Rathke did not take into account complexities introduced by relativistic quantum mechanics, and that without doing so Rathke was not justified in rejecting the possibility of a hydrino state.[18] Inspired by Naudts' response to Rathke, Norman Dombey concluded that hydrino states were "unphysical" due to certain problems with non-relativistic counterparts, coupling strength and binding strength.[19] Edmund Storms (2007) claimed that Mills' theory explains reports of cold fusion experiments,[20] though they have been discredited by the scientific community. [edit] Responses by outside researchers in chronological order October 27, 2000: Robert L. Park, of the University of Maryland, writes a follow-up: "Unlike most schemes for free energy, the hydrino process of Randy Mills is not without ample theory (WN 8 Jan 99). Mills has written a 1000 page tome, entitled,"The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Quantum Mechanics," that takes the reader all the way from hydrinos to antigravity (WN 9 May 97). Fortunately, Aaron Barth (not to be confused with Erik Baard, the Randy Mills' apologist), has taken upon himself to look through it, checking for accuracy. Barth is a post doctoral researcher at the Harvard-Smithsonian Institute, and holds a PhD in Astronomy, 1998, from UC, Berkeley. What he found initially were mathematical blunders and unjustified assumptions. To his surprise, however, portions of the book seemed well organized. These, it now turns out, were lifted verbatim from various texts. This has been the object of a great deal of discussion from Mills' Hydrino Study Group. Mills seems not to understand what the fuss is all about." - Park[21] May–November 2002: A NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) Phase I study is conducted at Rowan University, led by mechanical engineering professor Anthony Marchese, to investigate the so-called BlackLight Process for use in spacecraft propulsion. The team reports that with assistance from BlackLight Power, they successfully replicated previous results, including the observation of line broadening indicative of hydrogen atoms moving much faster than would ordinarily be expected under the experimental conditions.[22] January 4, 2005: Šišović et al. have reported that observed line-broadening contradicts Mills's models.[23] May 20, 2005: Andreas Rathke of the European Space Agency publishes a critical analysis in the New Journal of Physics. He concluded: "We found that CQM is inconsistent and has several serious deficiencies. Amongst these are the failure to reproduce the energy levels of the excited states of the hydrogen atom, and the absence of Lorentz invariance. Most importantly, we found that CQM does not predict the existence of hydrino states!" - Rathke[14][24] August 5, 2005: Jan Naudts of the University of Antwerp argues that Rathke did not take into account complexities introduced by relativistic quantum mechanics, and that without doing so Rathke was not justified in rejecting the possibility of a hydrino state.[25] 2006: inspired by Naudts' response, Norman Dombey concluded that Mill's theory of hydrino states is "unphysical". According to Dombey, the hydrino states would require:[19] 1.non-relativistic counterparts to remain physical, but they don't have them. 2.compatibility with a coupling strength (fine structure constant) equal to zero to remain physical, yet "hydrino states" seem to exist in the absence of any coupling strength. 3.binding strength that falls with the coupling strength. The hydrino model predicts that binding strength for hydrino states increases as the coupling strength falls, rendering the states unphysical. April 2007: Antonio Di Castro showed that the states below the ground state, as described in Mills' theory, are incompatible with the Schrödinger, Klein-Gordon and Dirac equations."[26] 2007: In a review of cold fusion research, Edmund Storms, a cold fusion researcher, concludes that the hydrino model provides a possible explanation for cold fusion.[20] May 1, 2008: Hans-Jürgen Kunze suggests "that spectral lines, on which the fiction of fractional principal quantum numbers in the hydrogen atom is based, are nothing else but artefacts." [27] June 6, 2008: Robert L. Park, of the University of Maryland, writes a follow-up: "BlackLight Power (BLP), founded 17 years ago as HydroCatalysis, announced last week that the company had successfully tested a prototype power system that would generate 50 KW of thermal power. BLP anticipates delivery of the new power system in 12 to 18 months. The BLP process, (WN 26 Apr 91) , discovered by Randy Mills, is said to coax hydrogen atoms into a "state below the ground state," called the "hydrino." There is no independent scientific confirmation of the hydrino, and BLP has a patent problem. So they have nothing to sell but bull shit. The company is therefore dependent on investors with deep pockets and shallow brains." - Park[28] September 2008: BLP publishes the assertion that researchers at Rowan University reported reproducible bursts of heat when testing BlackLight cells and prototype reactors, using materials provided by BlackLight.[29] Critics have complained about borrowing reactors from Blacklight instead of building their own, past collaboration of the author with Mills, and lack of detail in the calorimeter measurements, which makes it difficult to tell if all sources of error were taken into account.[5][6] The company says that, for now, it is keeping secret how to loop the system to achieve a self-sustaining reaction that provides a continuous output of heat, in order to keep its own researchers a step ahead in the research of the system.[6] As of 2008, the company predicts that totally independent researchers should be able to test the full system by around October 2009.[6] August 12, 2009: A BLP press release asserts that scientists at Rowan University have for the first time independently formulated and tested fuels that on demand generated energy greater than that of combustion at power levels of kilowatts using BLP’s proprietary solid-fuel chemistry capable of continuous regeneration. Operating power systems using BLP’s chemistry, Rowan University professors have reported a net energy gain of up to 6.5 times the maximum energy potential of the materials in the system from known chemical reactions.[30] "It does portend some type of novel energy source," said Peter Jansson, associate engineering professor at Rowan.[31] [edit] Alleged experimental findings According to the BLP website, Mills et al. have published over 70[32] peer-reviewed experimental studies reporting significant observations, including: Chemical reactions that produce plasmas in gas cells with input energies far below the level that conventional theory predicts is required to produce such plasmas. Spectral lines from gas cell plasmas which match the predictions for hydrino transitions.[33] Detection of excess heat from plasma cells using water bath calorimetry. New chemical compounds said to have been formed from hydrino hydrides (i.e. a hydrino which has captured another electron to form a negative hydride ion) which show unusual properties and structure. Molecular 'dihydrino' gas formation and detection. Experiments demonstrating excess energy when sodium hydride is heated in contact with Raney nickel catalyst (R-Ni)[34] [edit] Corporate history [edit] Founder and CEO Randell Mills Randell Mills graduated from Harvard Medical School,[2] and studied biotechnology and electrical engineering at MIT.[35] He has a Bachelor of Arts Degree in Chemistry, summa cum laude and Phi Beta Kappa, from Franklin & Marshall College in 1982.[citation needed] Blacklight Power says it may have tapped the energy that cosmologists have struggled to explain, called dark matter, which fills the universe. "It represents a boundless form of new primary energy". "I think it's going to replace all forms of fuel in the world.", said Randell Mills to Reuters.[31] An article in the technology column of the New York Times described in 2008 how Mills had kept plugging on and getting $60 million in venture funding despite his theories being first rejected and then ignored by the scientific community during years; it called the Blacklight reactors an interesting technology that could revolutionize the energy world, although it said that it was prudent to wait for more independent verification.[6] IEEE Spectrum magazine listed Blacklight as a "loser" technology in its 2009 report because "Most experts don’t believe such lower states exist, and they say the experiments don’t present convincing evidence."[5] [edit] Development Randell Mills founded the company in 1991.[2] According to Park it was founded as HydroCatalysis Inc. and later renamed to Blacklight Power Inc.[1] By 1999 the company was claiming to have produced excess energy for over a year.[1] By 2000 Mills raised $25 million in funding for the company, and in 2009 he had raised $60 million.[5][6] Mills convinced several researchers that supported him to sit at the board of his company.[2] On June 14, 2007, Blacklight Power's subsidiary, Millsian, offered a molecular-modeling software-application based on CQM theory. The subsidiary had been formed in June 2006 as Molegos Inc. and renamed in October 2006.[7] On May 28, 2008, a press release by BLPI claimed successful testing of a prototype generating 50,000 watts of thermal power on demand.[36] Its board members included former Assistant Secretary of Energy Shelby Brewer and Michael H. Jordan, who has served as CEO of various major corporations including PepsiCo Int'l. Foods and Beverages, Westinghouse Electric Corporation, CBS Corporation, and EDS.[37][38] [edit] Commercial licensing On December 11, 2008, BLPI announced that it has signed its first commercial license, with Estacado Energy Services;[39] but there was no corresponding announcement from Estacado. The Columbia Journalism Review commented at length on the credulous reportage by CNN's Poppy Harlow of the BLPI release in an article entitled "Weird Science (Reporting)".[40] On January 6, 2009, Blacklight Power issued a press release announcing that it has signed its second commercial license agreement with Farmers' Electric Cooperative of New Mexico to produce up to 250 MW of continuous power.[41] [edit] Involvement with Rowan University On October 20, 2008, BLPI made a statement that Peter Jansson of Rowan University had completed a three month test of their reactors and validated excess heat production.[42][43] August 12, 2009: BLP press release through Hill & Knowlton claims that researchers at Rowan University reproduced BlackLight process, using their own materials. Results were claimed to show 1.2 times to 6.5 times the energy released than can be attributed by known chemical reactions. Detailed instructions of the process are said to be released so that third party verification can take place. Rowan researchers were said to have produced their own material from purchased chemicals, to avoid the caveats realised in the previous 2008 test.[44][45] [edit] Patents In 2000, the United States Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) approved Blacklight's patent application 09/009,294 entitled "Hydride Compounds" after an initial rejection, and gave it US 6030601 . The fee had already been paid, but it hadn't still reached the stage of final issuance. The company was later granted US 6024935 "Lower-Energy Hydrogen Methods and Structures". An outside request from Robert L. Park[46] prompted Director Group Director Kepplinger to review this new patent himself, and he expressed concerns about the patent's theoretical basis, the existence of fractional quantum numbers, and noticed that the patent application, 09/009,294, had the same theoretical basis. He contacted another Director, Robert Spar, who also expressed doubts on the patentability of the patent application. This caused the USPTO to withdraw from issue the patent application before it was granted and re-open it for review, and to withdraw four related applications. This prompted Blacklight to sue in the US District Court of Columbia, saying that withdrawing the 09/009,294 patent after having paid the fee was contrary to law. In 2002 the District Court concluded that the USPTO was acting inside the limits of its authority in withdrawing a patent over whose validity it had doubts, and later that year the United States Court of Appeals for the Federal Circuit ratified this decision.[47][48] The current status of US 6024935 is unclear, and it is still listed as a granted patent in the USPTO website.[49] In March and April 2008, Blacklight Power had four UK patent applications relating to models and apparatus based on hydrino theory refused by the UK Intellectual Property Office. The decision was based on "the experimental evidence provided and the acceptance of the theory by the physics community generally", which led to the conclusion that the theory "was probably not valid", and therefore that the inventions were not "capable of industrial application" as required by UK patent law.[50] In November 2008, the UK Patents Court overturned the rejection of the four patents, ruling that they should only have been rejected if the theory was clearly invalid (rather than probably invalid) and remitted the case to the Patent Office for reconsideration.[51][52] In June 2009 a hearing officer at the UK patent office found that a full investigation with the help of an expert in GUTCQM wouldn't have a reasonable prospect of finding it a valid theory, and rejected the patents again.[53] The company does hold US 7188033 for rendering the chemical bonds of hydrogen using imaging software, covering their "Millsian" molecular modeling software application.[54] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blacklight_Power

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