Jones wrote: > Mike, > > > Mills' is reluctant to have any association with CF, LENR, > CANR and nuclear phenomena. > > Does that sound rational to you? Does that sound like the > well-considered logic of a person committed to solving our > looming ecological crisis?
I gave reasons from his earliest days. At that time, and still, CF, LENR, and CANR are popular poison, ridiculed in the press, and now even Scientific American in a fairly balanced article, has a bottom line of "nothing changed". Mills has courted business and wealthy investors and so he has to present a face of a businessman. The looming ecological crisis will be solved only by focused industrial development to make zillions of devices. You have been aware of the technology for some time, I assume you can read the posted technical reports, which show steady progress, and have read my commentaries on HSG about the major engineering problems remaining. Both CF and BLP face major engineering problems before there will be **any** impact on the environmental crisis. Mills has shown several key reactions with high energy density and has done so repeatedly, and reproduction has occurred. Scaling these up to kilowatt levels, and simplifying the support equipment is another matter, as using source gases or water of commercial purity instead of laboratory grade stuff. I don't know what you mean by an association with CF, LENR, and CANR mean. These are nuclear phenomena, and the BLP reactions deal with the electron, and so are chemical phenomena. You, and others, have speculated that a highly shrunken hydrino takes on a neutron-like character and may be a factor in LENR. That may be so, but it is not useful. Mills has reported seeing emission lines he associates with p = 7 hydrinos, and maybe p =16, but I suspect the population is small. Mills has enough problems with the technology he is studying without dissipating his efforts with CF, LENR and CANR. > > The cynic might say that it sounds more like an egoist being > either selfish, or very deceptive. Does not any executive's > responsibilities go beyond the stockholders to society at > large? Just what do you expect? He is working hard along the lines his investors expect, and if he succeeds, the society at large will benefit in a major way, as will his stockholders. > > > MC: His path is alliances with large corporations where he > appears as the consummate businessman with valuable patents > which he can and will defend. > > OK. What large corporation has signed-on to develop, or to > produce, a BLP product? That is in negotiation at this stage and I have no certain information. What I do have suggests that the technical staff of candidate corporations have to convince themselves that Mills' work is valid before they recommend to their management to make a major bet-your-company commitment. A while back I heard that at company X they saw the Doppler line broadening in a plasma and were arguing among themselves about the source of it. That observation in part supports the orbitsphere model, which is condemned by various "authorities" as you well know. So if you are CEO of a potential partner are you going to sink big bucks into a project which may not scale up easily and may have serious problems, like requiring ultra pure reagents to work? Ask the same question about the CF world and the situation is worse. Nobody is offering reliable cathodes for sale. The interesting high energy experiments are rare accidents, not reproducible. Contamination may be a pervasive and hidden variable, but contamination by what? Jed has railed at the CF investigators for years now for not coming out with demo units so the forces of competitive entrepreneurship will solve the ecological crises in the developing world. Further, CF requires deuterium, found in 0.7% of all water. It's a small percentage, but there is a lot of water, so an effectively unlimited supply. But what is the energy cost of extraction? I'm told it costs about as much as beer on the open market. Great, if it is used efficiently, but what percentage of D atoms really get used? > > > He need convince only CEOs and their immediate technical > staffs, not the public, nor members of vortex or HSG. > > Has he convinced any CEO to become a manufacturing partner? Not yet, in negotiation. Some of the early investors in BLP were major utilities. Before you can get a commitment from a manufacturing partner, there must be confidence in patent protection. When BLP gets publicly "real" there will be a rush of imitators and the investors want to be in a position to collect royalties. The USPTO has pulled back one basic patent because it 'violates known principles' or some such thing. The latest applicaiton is massive, not basic, but covering virtually every variation on what has been published. Mills is producing more and more documentation. This is not just theoretical preening -- it builds a formidable defense in what may be an epic patent battle. Industrial partners have to be confident that Mills will win such fights and defend the patents they are paying to license. > > He tried successfully to convince Capstone, the cutting-edge > manufacturer of micro-turbines, and they were ready willing > and able, but Mills could not deliver on his end - after > saying publicly in 1998 that he expected a commercial > product in 18 months. He also said in interviews 8 years ago > that he was going public soon. As he has said several times. He has put up a number of trial balloons of this or that energy extraction method, partly to maintain investor interest. Some may pay off, someday, but the road is rocky. > > The problem is, if you go public, then you can no longer > hide behind a veil of secrecy. Isn't that the real reason > why he has not done so? Secrecy? What secrecy? A website with years of detailed reports of experiments, a massive theoretical magnum opus now online for all to read? What is not published is perhaps months of failure before success in one mode or another, and accumulating know how in scaling up reactions. > > And BTW, has BLP not had at least one major defection from > the board of directors? Who? One technical staff person left for a university position. I believe that one of the original investors, an energy company, had a position the board. but that company was acquired, and the new company apparently decided that BLP in its then state was not on their forward track, and may have pulled their board member. No big deal. > > > MC: No doubt when it becomes "real" there will be a rush > of imitators. > > But how many years of patent protection will be left by > then? Quite a few. The big applications patent may not have been awarded yet, and it would probably have a 20 year run. In the long run, what matters is the head start you have. If you actually read the papers on the website, particularly the Phillips papers, it is evident that the energy yield is a complex function of the operating conditions. So one can cobble together a system from he description in a BLP paper and see the phenomenon, but it may take a lot of know-how to make the yield 100 times as large. I expect a time when lots of people can make BLP reactors, but the best ones will come from BLP licensees, and that may remain so for quite some time. > > I think the point that you are minimizing here, is not the > plodding pace of progress from BLP, but the urgency of doing > something meaningful in a national or worldwide effort to > begin to eliminate CO2 before it, in effect, eliminates us. Plodding? There is Mills, a highly energetic writer, churning out theory and pointing the way. Then there is a handful of PhD lab staff and assistants who have a remarkable output of papers and developments over the last few years. There have been no application papers for about a year now, which is not surprising; as you get closer to applications, the less is said. Look at the current Scientific American for an interesting take on global warming. Based on ice core data, the methane content of the atmosphere closely tracks cyclical variations in solar input to the earth from axial precession. We should have been in a cooling trend for the last several thousand years, headed for an ice age, if it were not for the methane and CO2 produced by human activity. It's now gotten acute. I think the point Jones is missing is that it is already late, and that to impact the methane and CO2 trends will require massive effort, beyond anything that has been done in human history. Take India and China, now reaching for a better life and very hungry for oil. The first use will not be in hybrid vehicles. To change over to CF or BLP driven systems will take many, many years of R&D. I've written about this on these forums many times, and it gets systematically ignored because most readers here are quite clueless about industrial R&D, and I have been there. > > If it requires BLP to use deuterium, then you bite the > bullet and use deuterium. If it requires you to deal with > the NRC, then you deal with the NRC. It is as simple as > that. He has been using nuclear materials, and dealing with > NRC in his medical research for 20 years. This no-NRC excuse > is a big pile of stinking crapola, IMHO. BLP does not 'require' deuterium. Mills has used D in some runs to get spectra to answer some critics, notably Pibel. The BLP process involves electrons, and D and H are just fine. No difference. You missed the point in my previous post. At the time Mills was courting corporate investors, CF was in disrepute [and still is in general], and he needed to clearly distinguish BLP from CF. They are separate. Mills has seen covert and overt attempts to frustrate his advance. At some point in the future, someone may well prompt the EPA to demand that Mills show that hydrinos and hydrino compounds are not toxic. After all, every BLP reactor produces hydrinos. They are new and their effects on biological systems are unknown, and people are scared of surprises like DDT. The fact that any good BLP application should include means to efficiently collect hydrinos for chemical uses, such as hyper-batteries, will be part of the scene. > > The real point is that if it requires another 15 years for > BLP to get a hydrogen-only product to market, then there may > be no market left to buy it. And the same for any CF products. I suspect that there may be an announcement of a BLP-X alliance this year, and perhaps an IPO under a new corporate name for that alliance. At that time, various disclosures will be required. There may never be an IPO from BLP. The arrangement sought is an 80/20 split, with BLP getting an 20% share for the technology and technical support, and the partner putting up all the development money. Having a prototype of, say, a power plant is not the same as achieving a significant market penetration, which may take 15 years. > > OTOH, if it turns out that BLP *could have had* a Capstone > turbine product on the market in 2000, one that did use > deuterium and did require a license form the NRC, but that > Mills did not do this for ego-reasons, then he could share > real moral culpability for that little ego-trip. Especially > if it turns out that a hydrogen-only product is not do-able > at all but that a deuterium-fueled product would have > staved-off what will, without question, be a global > catastrophe if we delay progress into the next generation. Utter speculation, Jones. You have been chasing the notion that BLP is "really" nuclear for some time.That's fine, but it is not consistent with everything that Mills has published on his website. At one time Mills was talking about a thermally driven system with a microturbine and Capstone is a player in the field. I seem to remember some commentary at the time that the performance of the Capstone systems was not as good as advertised. None of these systems make any sense until Mills can increase the energy yield of his reactors to the point that they can overcome the conversion losses and run on water alone. The basic, simple p = 2 hydrino reaction yields more energy per atom than is required to get that H atom from an H2O molecule. That does not include the energy necessary to run the system, and it does not include the losses in a thermal system to take the heat output of a BLP reactor and extract H2 from water. The last time I talked to Mills, several years ago, he said he was about a factor of 4 away from a closed loop. Recent reactor runs have shown a detectable population of higher p values. In one of the Phillips papers, it is mentioned that the energy yield calculations indicate that most of the hydrogen was converted to H(1/4), with substantially higher energy yield per atom. That is very good, but you still have to produce high temperature, high pressure steam to run a Capstone turbine. More attractive is a Stirling engine, which does not require high temperature and pressure. > > Artic warming is a gigantic risk, a risk of extinction > threatening all life on earth, unless something is done > soon. This artic methane-release connection is a > ticking-time-bomb, and if genius-level people like Mills > cannot appreciate that, then our grandchildren, and his, > will have no real future, maybe even no survival. I'm sure Mills can appreciate this as much as you can. There will not be an extinction of "all life on earth" any more than there was in past catastrophes. Our comfortable, fragile, technical civilization may take a hit, however. But going out into the field and pulling on the sprouts isn't going to make them grow any faster. > Mike Carrell
