“This potential breakthrough in hydrogen and the description by our senior research associate and Advisory Board member Daryl Roberts of how this application is being developed by this private company, is definitely worth tracking.
~Hazel Henderson, Editor“
Brilliant Light Power – Commercialization Status
A potentially paradigm-shifting technology has been under development at an R&D firm in NJ called Brilliant Light Power. For people monitoring the situation, the question currently is about the status of commercialization. It is not a publicly held firm, but is in mid-stages of VC capitalization in the range of $100-120M.
I recently read a book titled Randall Mills and the Search for Hydrino Energy, offering a detailed and compelling history of the development of this novel renewable energy technology, authored by an insider, an intern who stayed on to work there for several years (published in 2016, with company data as of end of 2015). In order to provide some context, this article will summarize the concept, breakthrough achievements, compare its levelized costs to other generation technologies, offer a brief review of validation efforts, and touch on personnel and capitalization. I will try to be faithful to information presented in the book and website materials, and will try to identify my own cautious opinions in context.
Concept
The technology was developed by Randall Mills, whose special talents manifested while still a graduate student in physics at Harvard, when he made a discovery in 1989 while exploring a foundational question in physics about why an orbiting electron did not radiate away its energy. Quantum mechanics diverged from classical mechanics without ever answering this question. Mills emerged with a revised classical theory that included the proposition that hydrogen’s ground state can in fact be lower than previously thought, that it can have fractional ground states.
According to Mills’ theory, hydrogen can react with a catalyst in a 2-step process, in which first a small amount of energy is transferred by a process called resonant inductive coupling, in integer increments of 27.2 eV. When this photon is accepted by the catalyst from the atomic hydrogen, the hydrogen electron then becomes unstable and will decay into a lower, fractional orbital, closer to the nucleus. This 2nd step releases a larger increment of energy than would be predicted by any other known chemical reactions, 200x higher than burning hydrogen. The ending species of hydrogen was dubbed a “hydrino”.
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