I want to thank everyone offering me feedback in the likely properties of the hydrino as described by Mills.
I want to clarify my goal in the depiction of hydrinos in the story. I'm not looking to use them as a boogeyman for a sci-fi body horror story. The goal is to take the theory seriously and explore what the properties and environmental risks would be of this byproduct if the theory is accurate. Because of this, I need the science of what I'm doing to adhere as closely as possible to the theory as described by Mills.
Clearly, the claims of the hydrino being inert are ********. There's nothing in the thery suggesting they could even BE inert. It's incompetent hand-waving at best, outright deception at worst. These things will be at least as reactive as regular hydrogen with the added bonus of being unstable. It's the nature of that instability I need to figure out. From there I can figure out the kind of damage they could cause.
Based on BLP's claims, there appear to be two ways to go: stable or unstable.
What we have to go on is that hydrogen atoms collapse into hydrinos giving off uv light in the process. if all the hydrogen atoms start out in the traditional ground state, and all collapse into the same fractional state (1/2), then they would all emit the same frequency photons. The reactor would be somewhat similar to a laser, in which ordinary ground state hydrogen constitutes "pumped" hydrogen and the secret catalyst is the stimulus to collapse exothermically to the lower state. (Unlike a laser, the monochromatic light would not be coherent or unidirectional, because the stimulus is not the emitted light itself.) The light is not monochromatic, though, which means the hydrogen starts out in a variety of excited states and/or collapses into a variety of fractional states.
Because they have given off some energy, hydrinos should be slightly lighter than hydrogen atoms. They still contain the same subatomic particles, so they should still have most of the mass of the hydrogen atom and should be overall neutral in charge.
Chemical interaction is a difficult question to address; it's one of those questions of what other impossibilities an assumed impossibility might lead to. We can speculate that the electron in a fractional state cannot participate in covalent bonding, but what we know of covalent bonding is based on the nature of electron orbitals deriving ultimately from quantum mechanics, which is already being broken by the existence of the fractional state in the first place. The closest analogue would be a noble gas, an atom whose outermost occupied orbital shell is "full" (or as a closer analogue still, we can say, whose next available orbital shell is "empty") and so does not bond covalently.
We might imagine these atoms as having the properties of WIMPs (weakly interacting massive particles) in cosmological theory: having the mass of a small atom would satisfy the "massive" requirement, and chemical inertness might seem sufficient to make them "weakly interacting." But they are not weakly interacting by cosmology's standard, because they interact electromagnetically, which WIMPs cannot do (which is why the latter are a hypothesized, though not currently favored, form of "dark" matter). For instance, they have (according to BMP) a detectable spectrum, which means they not only interact electromagnetically, they do so in familiar conventional ways.
Hence, it should be quite possible for a stray electron to interact with a hydrino and form a hydrino anion (I'll call it Hy-) which should in turn be highly reactive, essentially monatomic hydrogen but with a negative charge. Previously unknown compounds such as a number of hydrinos sharing a single electron, or bound covalently by two extra electrons might be possible. (Hy
n- or Hy
n--.) Such ions need not themselves be stable to be chemically active; consider, for example, the role of the hydrogen cation H+ (aka a proton) in photosynthesis. The ways a Hy- could screw up biochemistry (by, for example, replacing an H in a large molecule, but altering its overall electric charge distribution with its extra fractional electron) are rather alarming to contemplate.
The stable versus unstable question I alluded to before comes down to, how readily does the hydrino gas absorb energy from its environment in order to return to normal hydrogen atoms. Fully stable hydrino would be stuck permanently in the hydrino state (which alone doesn't make it entirely unreactive, as we just saw above), while unstable or (as I'd term it) "cold" hydrino would readily transform back into hydrogen, necessarily absorbing energy from its surroundings to do so. If unstable that way at e.g. room temperature, note that cold hydrino would add violation of the laws of thermodynamics to its retinue of impossibilities, but it could instead be an absorber of high-energy photons without invoking that problem. (It does have a spectrum, after all, supposedly.) The important part to remember is that whatever mechanism unstable hydrino returns to stable hydrogen, it requires energy rather than giving it off. I wonder whether a large enough dense enough (a given pressure of hydrino gas should be extremely dense, if we can find a way to confine it) mass of unstable hydrino gas could snuff out a nuclear detonation.
Note that hydrino could be unstable in other ways I haven't discussed here, such as readily undergoing fusion.
For completeness here's my post from a few pages ago summarizing the "known" properties
according to BLP of the hydrino gas waste product. Odd that that was followed by a sudden flurry of arguments about patent law and other distracting topics.
This is not going to happen, given that if the reaction works
as claimed, it releases into the atmosphere (41:35 in the linked video) a waste product that essentially represents a previously unknown state of matter with properties unknown to the material, biomedical, and environmental sciences, which by BLP's own claims cannot be contained (1:22:10 in the linked video), but which can accumulate in certain materials (1:20:50 in the linked video) including carbon (1:20:00 in the linked video).
They're going to need to do some work (a few decades' worth, it appears; they should have started in the 1990s!) to establish safe exposure limits, health and environmental impacts. Or to prove the lack of any hazard with thorough and well-controlled studies.
As of late 2016, they had one "new hire" investigating the properties of the hydrino gas waste product (1:20:29 in the linked video). I'm sure the EPA will find that very reassuring.
Of course, if the whole thing is actually a scam and there's no such thing as hydrino gas, they won't have that concern.