The Guardian reported last Friday on a potential new hydrogen fuel process, discovered by medical doctor Randell Mills, that would allow us to tap water for heat with roughly the same efficiency as coal. Supposedly, prototype heaters making use of this process have already been demonstrated and the process replicated independently. The only problem is that it appears to be physically impossible.
The proposed theory involves hydrinos, or hydrogen atoms with an electron orbit smaller than the ground state. That one sentence is probably sufficient to send any quantum physicist into fits, as the very notion is preposterous and conflicts with all established models. This hasn't stopped papers on hydrinos from showing up in peer reviewed journals, such as the New Journal of Physics, the Journal of Applied Physics, and the Journal of Hydrogen Energy, and one paper from the Advanced Aeronautical/Space Concept Studies Program is available online. Most notably, these papers have included repeatable experimental results finding mysterious creation of heat:
It is difficult to explain how (under the same microwave power input conditions) control gases and control gas/H2 mixtures only produce approximately 40 W of heating, while H2/catalyst mixtures such as H2O, H2/He, H2/Ar mixtures, etc. consistently produce 55 to 62 W.
The theory proposed to explain it, however, is dubious at best. In addition to violating fundamental rules of quantum mechanics, the math appears to be bad. An analysis of the model published earlier this year in the New Journal of Physics not only found it internally inconsistent, but that it didn't even properly predict the hydrino state.
That hasn't stopped Dr. Mills from putting together a company to build new technology based on this process, starting with water heaters, and his prototypes have apparently been convincing enough to draw investors, as well as convince NASA to fund experiments into using this technology in rockets.
This leaves a few possibilites: either Dr. Mills has indeed overturned quantum mechanics, and just hasn't quite worked out the right math to describe how it works, or he's got a completely different process that has nothing to do with his theory but mysteriously seems to work anyways, or he's one spectacular con artist.
Whether or not he really knows what he's doing, the current state of the world's fuel supply is so dire that I'm really, really hoping that he's on to something, as opposed to just being on something.
That and hoping that whatever he's discovered doesn't have any nasty side effects... like, for example, wiping out all life on earth. But what would the thrill of science be without the constant looming threat of armageddon?
