Environment & Energy

... has been underground all this time, and that in centuries* of drilling, somehow NO ONE ever realized it. It's as if millions of people who have been mining and drilling and sampling and studying the Earth for all these years just kind of pulled a massively collective oopsie and failed to notice one of the Universe's most common and best-studied elements was just sitting on their doorstep, in abundance. Considering that most of the chemical elements -- including relative rarities such as gallium, germanium, the lanthanides, thorium, and uranium, and even rhenium, the rarest stable element** -- were discovered by mining engineers and chemists who, for the most part, weren't really even looking for them, I just found the whole idea to be wildly implausible -- like, Brilliant Light Power implausible. I suspect, in the end, this will turn out to be just like Randell Mills' repeatedly renamed corporation-in-tireless-pursuit-of-funding -- a superficially (semi??)plausible theory backed by plenty of abused and misused scientific terminology and ambiguous evidence to secure lots of $$$$$$$$, with the principals involved being fully aware that there's no hope of delivering a fraction of their promises. Or maybe I'm being too cynical, and "white hydrogen" will turn out to be the "N-rays" of the 21st century.


* In 211 BCE, the first known natural gas well was drilled in China to reported depths of 150 meters (500 feet). The Chinese drilled their wells with bamboo poles and primitive percussion bits for the express purpose of searching for gas in limestones.

** Re has only one stable isotope; the majority of natural Re is actually an unstable isotope with a very long half-life.