The SAFIRE Project — Testing the Electric Sun in the Lab

Most cosmologies are argued on paper. The Electric Universe did something almost no heterodox theory ever attempts: it built a machine to test itself. The SAFIRE Project — Stellar Atmospheric Function In Regulation Experiment — set out to recreate the behavior of the Sun's surface on a benchtop, by placing a positively charged sphere in a chamber of plasma and watching what the plasma did. What the team reports it found is among the most remarkable claims in the whole Electric Universe story: a tiny "star" that organized itself into glowing shells, released far more energy than was put in, and — most startling of all — appeared to transmute one element into another.

This page lays out the experiment, the people, and the results as the SAFIRE team and its successor company report them.

What it set out to do

The idea traces to 2011, when engineer Montgomery Childs — then working on photovoltaic energy systems — noticed aspects of the Sun's behavior that seemed to contradict the standard solar model, and found his way to the electric Sun work. The mandate he arrived at was deliberately pragmatic: distill the model to a single testable process — "charged plasma affecting matter of a different electrical potential" — and build it. As Childs put it, "if you want to test something, you have to know it is testable." If the Sun is, as the model holds, the glowing anode of a galactic electrical circuit, then a charged anode in a plasma chamber should reproduce the photosphere's essential behavior.

David Talbott invited Childs to propose the experiment to the Electric Universe group at the 2012 conference, and the project was officially launched at the 2013 conference. It was funded through the Mainwaring Archive Foundation, administered by the International Science Foundation, and run by Childs's engineering firm, Aurtas International. By the project's own accounting, "$15 million dollars in cash and kind was spent over 6 years and the original SAFIRE mandate was successfully realized in 2019." The work then passed to a new company, Aureon Energy (below); throughout, Childs and physicist Michael Clarage delivered annual updates at the Electric Universe conferences. Wal Thornhill and Donald Scott took part as consulting theorists, but the experiment itself was run as an independent program with one stated objective: to test the model, wherever the evidence led.

The reactor

The apparatus is elegantly simple in concept. A positively charged spherical anode is suspended at the center of a vacuum chamber, surrounded by a cathode; the chamber holds a low-pressure gas (primarily hydrogen and nitrogen), with pressure, gas mix, and voltage all adjustable across a wide range. Switch it on and the anode glows — and, crucially, the plasma around it organizes itself. First small tufts appear on the anode, holding equal spacing as they drift; then concentric, independently rotating double layers form around it, "onion-like spheres" each a different color — the thin charge-separated sheaths Hannes Alfvén identified as fundamental plasma structures. The team presents this glowing, self-tufting anode as a working benchtop analog of the Sun's photosphere.

The early "Phase One" (2014) used a small iron-composite anode, two to four centimeters across, inside a glass bell jar driven by an 1,800-watt supply. Childs described the plasma settling into an electromagnetic "rhythm, like a heartbeat… it's almost as if the universe is singing" — and even this benchtop rig, the team reports, produced transient discharges they measured at two to ten million watts from that 1,800-watt input. "Phase Two" scaled it up into a full instrumented reactor — some forty thousand engineered parts, a four-foot-by-seven-foot steel chamber, a 4K camera watching through a sapphire viewport. As the nested double layers collapse toward the anode they form one intense double layer with an extremely sharp voltage gradient just off the surface — a brilliantly glowing ball of light, and, the project states, the regime "in which the transmutations and excess energy production occurs." One figure the team highlights: a voltage drop of about 270 volts across the razor-thin layer at the anode which, converted entirely to temperature, "would equate to 3,000,000 K — remarkably, the same temperature increase seen when moving from the Sun's chromosphere to its lower corona," a value Donald Scott had predicted in advance.

The people

• Montgomery Childs — founder, principal scientist, and chief engineer. An industrial-design and manufacturing-automation engineer by background (he founded Genesis Design Engineering and Linear Transfer Systems, and once designed a rocket to measure upper-atmosphere oxygen at the request of Canada's National Research Council); he holds a string of patents in machine control, solar energy, and plasma physics.

• Dr. Michael Clarage — lead/data scientist; a physics PhD from Brandeis who studied binary pulsars at the Arecibo radio telescope, he analyzes the experimental data against the latest results from sources like NASA, SOHO, and the Voyager and Rosetta probes.

• Wal Thornhill and Donald Scott — the electric-Sun model's leading theorists (see electric-sun), as consultants defining the model and proposing experiments.

• Dr. Paul Anderson (physical chemist, design-of-experiments) and Dr. W. Lowell Morgan (plasma physicist) rounded out the core science team, with Jano Onderco on data acquisition and Jason Lickver on systems engineering.

What the team reports

The SAFIRE team's reported findings, presented in its conference updates and films, fall into three groups.

Self-organizing structure. Stable, multi-shell plasma double layers form spontaneously around the anode and hold — the photosphere-like behavior the experiment was built to look for. The team also reports trapping high-energy photons (which it describes as "slowing the speed of light"), copious atomic hydrogen and free protons, electron densities it compares to the solar photosphere, and an anode core that runs cooler than the plasma around it — as the electric-Sun model expects of a star.

Excess energy. The team reports sudden "energy events" — localized bursts reaching 2,000–3,000 °C — and that at one point, running at only 7% of the input power needed to bring the chamber to its maximum safe temperature, all three independent output-energy metrics nonetheless climbed to their safe limits and the run had to be stopped: in the team's words, "clear evidence of excess energy production." All of this, they emphasize, with no hard radiation detected. (The team's own term is "excess energy," not "over-unity.")

Elemental transmutation. The most extraordinary claim: spectroscopy and electron microscopy indicated new elements that had not been there before — in the reactor's gas, on the anode's surface, and clear through to its interior. The team first reported it cautiously in 2017 — titanium, barium, and calcium found in a metal alloy that had contained none, "elements which were not present in the original metal alloy… it is uncertain at this time why these elements came to be there" — said third-party SEM/EDAX analysis confirmed it in 2019, and by 2020 was pointing to the spectral signature of manganese in an anode alloy that contained none, with Childs reporting they could "make manganese in the gas atmosphere of the reactor at will and have it disappear again." Across the runs the team marked some eighteen new elements on the periodic table — among them lithium, carbon, aluminum, silicon, calcium, titanium, manganese, zinc, tin, barium, lanthanum, and cerium. Childs's recurring summary of the whole program:

"In all our experiments and discoveries we have found no disparities with the Electric Sun model."

What the team pointedly does not claim is to know the mechanism. In its own words: "there is no accepted theory for the observed results in the SAFIRE chamber… The SAFIRE team does not endorse or support any particular theory or model" — it surveys candidate explanations and leaves the question open. It calls the process "warm plasma nucleosynthesis": heavier elements forming in the photosphere of a star, as the electric-Sun model expects, rather than deep within its core.

Aureon Energy — the commercial turn

With the mandate declared fulfilled in 2019, all of SAFIRE's intellectual property passed to Aureon Energy Ltd (Midland, Ontario; Childs founder and chairman) — a handoff documented in the public record by the December 2019 reassignment of Childs's "Ion generator apparatus" patent to the new company. Aureon has turned the discoveries toward two practical goals: clean energy and nuclear-waste remediation. The reactor evolved from the gas-phase original into an Elemental Transmutation Reactor (ETR) and a modular "Aureon Micro Reactor" working in liquid media — and a hand-sized unit the company calls SAFIRE III. Aureon describes a process that uses "controlled electromagnetic stimulation to initiate the fission of otherwise non-fissile radionuclides… converting long-lived radioactive materials into stable or significantly less hazardous daughter elements" while releasing usable energy. The company reports that 2023 experiments using thorium-232 and uranium-238 solutions produced daughter elements including iron, nickel, and lead, with excess heat proportional to the fuel used, and states that independent verification was performed by an outside laboratory (Gel Laboratories). A near-term target it names is stripping radioactivity from fracking wastewater.

The published record

One result from the program appeared in a peer-reviewed journal: L. A. Morgan & M. Childs, "Study of striations in a spherically symmetric hydrogen discharge," Plasma Sources Science and Technology 24 (2015). The project's headline findings — the double layers, the energy events, and the transmutation — were presented in SAFIRE's annual updates at the Electric Universe conferences, in the project's own films and reports, and on the SAFIRE and Aureon sites, where the reader can follow the work directly.

Watch the updates

The team's own films are the richest record — the scientists narrating their results, with footage of the glowing reactor.

The unveiling and the conference updates:

• SAFIRE: A Real-World Test of the Electric Sun — Part 1 and Part 2 (EU2013) — the public launch.

• EU2015 — Montgomery Childs: SAFIRE Project Update, Michael Clarage: SAFIRE and the Electric Sun Model, and Jano Onderco on instrumentation and data — the first hardware results.

• EU2016 — Childs's update and Clarage: SAFIRE as Astrophysical Laboratory.

• The SAFIRE Project 2017–2018 Update and the 2018 Report — the Phase Three findings, including transmutation.

• SAFIRE Project 2019 Update — the culmination, as the mandate was declared fulfilled.

The "SAFIRE Sun" short films (2020): The SAFIRE Sun · Origin of the SAFIRE Sun · SAFIRE — The Big Picture.

What it means, from the theorists: Wal Thornhill: SAFIRE and the Future of Science, Part One and Part Two · Donald Scott: SAFIRE and the Electric Sun (Space News, 2019); and a long-form Thunderbolts Podcast interview with Monty Childs.

Related pages

The Electric Sun

The Plasma Universe — Birkeland, Alfvén, Peratt

The Electric Universe — An Introduction

The Thunderbolts Project — People and History

Sources & Method

Sources & further reading

• SAFIRE Project — the project's own archival site: origin & mandate, team, and the phase pages (one, two, three)

• Aureon Energy — the commercial successor; science page on the transmutation/energy technology

• L. A. Morgan & M. Childs, "Study of striations in a spherically symmetric hydrogen discharge", Plasma Sources Science and Technology 24, 055022 (2015) — the program's peer-reviewed paper

• US Patent US10398015B2, "Ion generator apparatus" (M. Childs; granted 2019, assigned to Aureon Energy Ltd, Dec 2019)

• David Talbott, "The SAFIRE Project — Testing the Electric Sun" (Thunderbolts Project, 2012) — the original proposal