Puzzled Researchers Vet BlackLight’s Physics-Defying Hydrogen Power
BlackLight Power, the company that has pulled in $60 million for its seemingly physics-defying fuel cell, is back with an announcement about an independent validation of its technology. A team of engineers, headed by Dr. Peter Jansson at Rowan University, have tested BlackLight’s prototypes and found that the devices perform as BlackLight claims, ambiguously concluding that “there is a novel reaction of some type causing the large exotherm which is consistently produced.” To translate: There’s definitely lots of energy being produced. They’re just not sure why.
Cranbury, N.J.-based BlackLight says its technology can push an electron closer to the nucleus by way of a catalytic reaction, resulting in a huge amount of clean energy. The company describes the reaction as “somewhere between a nuclear and a chemical reaction,” but without any of the messy fallout. Update: The problem is that “relaxing” an electron below its ground state, as BlackLight says it can do, is fundamentally impossible, according to severalone peer-reviewed scientific paper debunking BlackLight’s so-called “Hydrino theory” that Mills disputes.
The team at Rowan tested BlackLight’s 1,000- and 50,000-watt reactors over three months and were able to replicate BlackLight’s energy claims, saying that the energy produced “cannot be explained by other known sources like combustion or nuclear energy.” The company says a complete verification of the whole process will likely happen within a year.
BlackLight tells us it is now in the process of licensing its technology to power producers. The company says it has enough capital to get through commercialization and plans to have its reactors in a power plant in the next two years. Like others, we’ll be waiting to see if those plans actually bear fruit.
The 19-year-old BlackLight Power has ruffled quite a few feathers in the quantum mechanics establishment. Blacklight’s founder and CEO, Randell Mills, has been causing controversy for years and many in the scientific community think the math behind his theory is flawed.
Despite those pesky skeptical physicists, BlackLight Power has managed to raise $60 million in funding from individual, impressive investors: the company’s Board includes Michael Jordan, former CEO of Electronic Data Systems and Westinghouse, and Neil Moskowitz, CFO of Credit Suisse First Boston.
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