It seems too good to be true: a new source of near-limitless power that costs virtually nothing, uses tiny amounts of water as its fuel and produces next to no waste. If that does not sound radical enough, how about this: the principle behind the source turns modern physics on its head.
Dr Randell Mills, a Harvard University medic who also studied electrical engineering at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1 000 times more heat than conventional fuel. Independent scientists claim to have verified the experiments and Mills says his company, Blacklight Power, has tens of millions of dollars in investment lined up to bring the idea to market. And he claims to be just months away from unveiling his creation.
The problem is that, according to the rules of quantum mechanics, the physics that governs the behaviour of atoms, the idea is theoretically impossible. ”Physicists are quite conservative. It’s not easy to convince them to change a theory that has been accepted for 50 to 60 years. I don’t think Mills’s theory should be supported,” said Jan Naudts, a theoretical physicist at the University of Antwerp.
What has much of the physics world up in arms is Mills’s claim that he has produced a new form of hydrogen, the simplest of all the atoms, with just a single proton circled by one electron. In his ”hydrino”, the electron sits a little closer to the proton than normal and the formation of the new atoms from traditional hydrogen releases huge amounts of energy.
This is scientific heresy. According to quantum mechanics, electrons can only exist in an atom in strictly defined orbits, and the shortest distance allowed between the proton and electron in hydrogen is fixed.
Mills says there can be only one explanation: quantum mechanics is wrong. ”We’ve done a lot of testing. We’ve got 50 independent validation reports, we’ve got 65 peer-reviewed journal articles,” he said.
Rick Maas, a chemist at the University of North Carolina (UNC) who specialises in sustainable energy sources, was allowed unfettered access to Blacklight’s laboratories this year. ”We went in with healthy scepticism. The last thing I want is to be remembered as the person who derailed a lot of sustainable energy investment into something that wasn’t real.”
But Maas and Randy Booker, a UNC physicist, were convinced. ”All of us who are not quantum physicists are looking at Mills’s data and we find it very compelling,” said Maas. ”Booker and I have both put our professional reputations on the line.”
Mills’s idea goes against almost a century of thinking. When scientists developed the theory of quantum mechanics, they described a world in which measuring the exact position or energy of a particle was impossible and in which the laws of classical physics had no effect. The theory has been hailed as one of the 20th century’s greatest achievements.
But it is an achievement Mills thinks is flawed. He turned back to earlier classical physics to develop a theory that allows an electron to move much closer to the proton at the heart of a hydrogen atom and, in doing so, release the substantial energy he seeks to exploit.
Mills’s theory, known as classical quantum mechanics and published in Physics Essays in 2003, has been criticised most publicly by Andreas Rathke of the European Space Agency. In a damning critique published recently in the New Journal of Physics, he argued that Mills’s theory was the result of mathematical mistakes.
Mills argues that there are plenty of flaws in Rathke’s critique. ”His paper’s riddled with mistakes. We’ve had other physicists contact him and say this is embarrassing to the journal; Rathke won’t respond.”
Those wanting to exploit the technology are pushing ahead. ”We would like to understand it from an academic standpoint and then use the implications to actually produce energy products,” said Maas. ”The companies that are lining up behind this are household names.”
Mills will not go into details of who is investing in his research, but rumours suggest a range of US power companies. It is also well known that Nasa’s institute of advanced concepts has funded research into finding a way of using Blacklight’s technology to power rockets.
According to Maas, the first product built with Blacklight’s technology, available in as little as four years, will be a household heater. As the technology is scaled up, he says, bigger furnaces will be able to boil water and turn turbines to produce electricity.
In a recent economic forecast, Maas calculated that hydrino energy would cost around US1,2c per kilowatt hour. This compares with an average of 5c for coal and 6c for nuclear energy.
”If it’s wrong, it will be proven wrong,” said Kert Davies, research director of Greenpeace USA. ”But if it’s right, it has the potential to solve our dependence on oil. Our stance is of cautious optimism.” — Â