VIDEO: Hydrino Power or Rewriting The Physics Books

A source of near-limitless power that costs virtually nothing, uses tiny amounts of water as its fuel and produces next to no waste. Sounds too good to be true?

Well, in the search for differentiating technologies - such as gob-smackingly advanced power sources, it's pays to look outside the singular domain of aerospace, according to David Holland Smith who heads "horizon scanning" within the UK Defence Science and Technology Laboratory (Dstl).

This agency of the Ministry of Defence exists to supply the very best, impartial, scientific and technical research and advice to its ministerial client as well as other government departments.

Speaking at the Royal Aeronautical Society's recent conference on the technology challenges of the new operational environment, Holland Smith highlighted some key areas to which some of the MoD's brightest boffins are turning their attention.  This is one: hydrino power, a radical enough proposition to turn modern physics completely on its head.



It's the brainchild of Randell Mills, a Harvard University and Massachusetts Institute of Technology alumnus, whose company Blacklight Power claims to have built a prototype power source that generates up to 1,000 times more heat than conventional fuel.

Dr Mills claims to have produced a new form of hydrogen, the simplest of all the atoms, with just a single proton circled by one electron. Based on a new chemical process, in Mills's "hydrino", the electron sits a little closer to the proton than normal, and the catalytic formation of new atoms releases huge amounts the latent energy of the hydrogen atom.

The problem, as highlighted by The Guardian newspaper, is that, according to the rules of quantum mechanics - the physics that governs the behaviour of atoms - the idea is theoretically impossible.

Holland Smith says, however, that web sources such as the Hydrino Study Group are continually being tracked for potential developments. "Key innovations typically comprise of a number of sub units which come together like pieces of a mosaic," he explains.