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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Brilliant Light Power | 1/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brilliant_Light_Power | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T09:17:42.960234+00:00 | kb-cron |
Brilliant Light Power, Inc. (BLP), formerly BlackLight Power, Inc. of Cranbury, New Jersey, is a company founded by Randell L. Mills, who claims to have discovered a new energy source from what he says is the electron in a hydrogen atom dropping below its ground energy state into a "hydrino state". The claims lack corroborating scientific evidence and the proposed hydrino states are unphysical and incompatible with key equations of quantum mechanics. BLP has announced several times that it was about to deliver commercial products based on Mill's theories but has never delivered any working product. Mills has self-published a closely related book, The Grand Unified Theory of Classical Physics and has co-authored numerous articles on hydrino-related phenomena. Critical analyses have been published in the peer reviewed journals Physics Letters A, New Journal of Physics, Journal of Applied Physics, and Journal of Physics D: Applied Physics. In 2009, IEEE Spectrum magazine characterized it as a "loser" technology because "most experts don't believe such lower states exist, and they say the experiments don't present convincing evidence" and mentioned that physicist Wolfgang Ketterle had said the claims are "nonsense".
== Company == The company, originally called HydroCatalysis Inc., was founded in 1991 by Randell Mills who claimed to have discovered a power source that "represents a boundless form of new primary energy" and that will "replace all forms of fuel in the world". On April 25, 1991 at a press conference in Lancaster, Pennsylvania, Mills first announced his hydrino state hypothesis which rejects the idea that "cold fusion" was occurring in studies surrounding the Fleischmann–Pons experiment. According to Mills all the effects (which themselves were disputed to be unreproducible) were caused by shrinkage of hydrogen atoms as they fell to a state below the ground state. Arguments offered by Mills were in contradiction to known chemistry and were dismissed by the scientific community. By December 1999, BLP raised more than $25 million from about 150 investors. By January 2006, BLP funding exceeded $60 million. Among the investors are PacifiCorp, Conectiv, retired executives from Morgan Stanley and several BLP board members like Shelby Brewer who was the top nuclear official for the Reagan Administration and Chief Executive Officer of ABB-Combustion Engineering Nuclear Power and former board member Michael H. Jordan (1936 – 2010), who was Chief Executive Officer of PepsiCo Worldwide Foods, Westinghouse Electric Corporation, CBS Corporation and Electronic Data Systems. In 2008, Mills said that his cell stacks could provide power for long-range electric vehicles, and that this electricity would cost less than 2 cents per kilowatt-hour. In December 2013, BLP was one of 54 applicants to receive ~$1.1M in grant funding from the New Jersey Economic Development Authority.
=== Collaborators with the company === In 1996, NASA released a report describing experiments using a BLP electrolytic cell. Although not recreating the large heat gains reported for the cell by BLP, unexplained power gains ranging from 1.06 to 1.68 of the input power were reported, which, whilst "...admit[ing] the existence of an unusual source of heat with the cell...falls far short of being compelling". The authors went on to propose the recombination of hydrogen and oxygen as a possible explanation of the anomalous results. Around 2002, the NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts (NIAC) granted a Phase I grant to Anthony Marchese, a mechanical engineer at Rowan University, to study a possible rocket propulsion that would use hydrinos. In 2002, Rowan University's Anthony Marchese said that whilst "agnostic about the existence of hydrinos", he was quite confident that there was no fraud involved with BLP. Although his NIAC grant was criticised by Bob Park, Marchese said "for me to not continue with this study would be unethical to the scientific community. The only reason not to pursue this would be because of being afraid of being bullied."