Yes, I find it disheartening that Mills has not seen fit to provide more help to Scott Little in his attempted replication of the simplest incarnation of his device. This is especially sad since, according to Mills, numerous other labs have been successful; plus he has raised some $50 million from private sources. But then again, some venture captialists do seem surprisingly gullible of late.
I fully agree that none of this -i.e. the money or the other lab tests, would be as convincing to me and to others who admire Scott Little's work as to see it sucessful. Scott put together a working Fusor in no time, so his failure with the hydrino may indicate that there is a problem with either disclosure or the concept istself.
After wading through Mills' book however, it would appear that there would have to be major conspiracty involing dozens of PhDs for him to be wrong. BTW the book is now available direct from the BLP site and it is quite impressive - but not without criticism. Some of Mills' reluctance can possibly be attributed to the problems that he is having in getting patent protection and the fact that trade secrets are involved. This may be especially true with the reverse gyrotron, on which prior patent protection has expired.
To clarify, it is possible if not likely that there exists one or more non-patentable contibutory techniques, particularly with the gas phase BLP device, that are necessary for easy replication - and that Mills is keeping these out of the public domain as trade secrets in the event that he cannot get full protection from USPTO.
That is one reason that I took this opportunity to encourage other experimenters like yourself to look a little deeper into how Mills concept could be applicable to the Fusor itself.
Also: 1.) As has been stated many times, the Fusor is very far from breakeven and there is no viable prospect that it will ever get there without a major breakthrough.
2.) There are any number of relativley easy add-on experiments that can be accomplished with the Fusor itself to see if the Mills ideas have any cross-over validity. One possibility was mentioned before- i.e. adding a small amount of strontium or other hydrino catalyst, but there are dozens of other possibilities.
3.) It may be a bit of a cop-out to believe that the necessary big breakeven improvement is beyond the abilities of experimenters at the entry level of funding - i.e. self-funding. After all, if you look at some of the relativley simple experiments that Rutherford, Lawrence and Philo himself performed in order to get us this far into the atomic age, it is not beyond reason to think that the next big thing will also come out of some lone inventor's private garage.
Sure this may be no more that cronic over-optimism on my part. I can only hope that it is a little infectious- as like millions of other Californians, my power could be cut-off today unannounced right now as I am typing this!
Jones Beene
Created on Thursday, February 08, 2001 12:30 PM EDT by Jones C. Beene