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Dec. 16, 2025 - Skeptoid
21:36
Skeptoid #1019: Testing the Thunderstorm Generator

This device claims to be able to dramatically improve the efficiency and emissions of any internal combustion engine. Learn about your ad choices: dovetail.prx.org/ad-choices

Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
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Time Text
The Thunderstorm Generator Scam 00:08:49
What do you get when you take a handful of books on New Age mysticism and shake them to create a big pile of pseudo-scientific jargon?
And you mix them all up with some pipes and hoses to attach to your lawnmower engine.
Basically, you'd get the Thunderstorm Generator, an engine bolt-on contraption whose biggest effect is to lighten your wallet.
And in our extended content for premium members, the latest in automotive water injection systems, real ones, that is.
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You're listening to Skeptoid.
I'm Brian Dunning from Skeptoid.com.
Testing the Thunderstorm Generator.
Welcome to the show that separates fact from fiction, science from pseudoscience, real history from fake history, and helps us all make better life decisions by knowing what's real and what's not.
Today, we're going to have a look at a minor YouTube sensation for the past couple of years, a home-built device that can be connected to an internal combustion engine that can, according to the claim, dramatically increase engine efficiency, even to the point that water can be substituted for the gasoline, while simultaneously making the exhaust so clean that it can be breathed directly.
People have been buying them and building their own and installing them on engines and showing that efficiency actually is improving, apparently.
It is the brainchild of Australian Malcolm Bendel, and its name is the Thunderstorm Generator, claimed by advocates to be the most significant invention in human history.
Many learned about the Thunderstorm Generator from ancient advanced civilization crackpot Randall Carlson when he promoted it on the Joe Rogan podcast in November of 2022.
Bendal claims that his technology is based on the plasmoid unification model, a God-given magical system which has been revealed only to him.
Here is just a subset of the resulting technologies Bendel claims his machine uses.
Frequencies, Earth cycles, intelligent design, octave tangenic resonance, a web of 24 energy laws, a system of 16 Taurus plasmoid precepts, an 8th century Hermetic text, Theosophy and the Occult, ether light energy, the Age of Aquarius, the Book of Revelations, Babylonian astronomy, energy to matter to energy conversion,
the plasmoid toroidal implosive turbine, the Earth's discharge of stacked frequencies to the Schumann cavity, and cold fusion.
Bendel summarizes his device as, quote, a proprietary plasmoid-induced and controlled atomic energy release process, which allows water to be used as an atomic fuel, end quote, thankfully.
And yet, when you look at a thunderstorm generator, which I shall hereafter abbreviate to TG, it presents as a pair of conventional-looking water filters and a pipe with some hoses to connect it to the intake and the exhaust of any small gas engine, like that on a lawnmower or generator.
No evident Babylonians or Theosophists.
Now, that may sound familiar to some of our older listeners, because Bendel's TG is not the first such device to hit the market.
At the Extraordinary Technology Conference in 1984, a guy named Paul Pantone introduced a device he called the GEET, for Global Environmental Energy Technology.
Although he gave different names to his collection of hoses and chambers, it was essentially exactly the same system as Bendel's, only Pantone also ran some of the exhaust in with his intake mixtures and also added an external tank where you could put just about any fluid you wanted and it would get vaporized and injected as well.
Pantone's GEET was granted a U.S. patent.
While Bendel cites every speculative pseudoscience technology he can think of, plus a whole lot of meaningless New Age babble, for his device, Pantone focused on that little separate tank and whatever you put into it.
Beer, urine, water, anything.
And he claimed the GET burned that as the fuel.
In fact, the engine was still running on the regular gasoline from its normal tank and merely blew the vapors of the additional liquid through the engine.
Even today, GEET enthusiasts on YouTube appear to believe that the water is being used as the fuel.
Remember, water is not a fuel.
It's in a low-energy state with no extractable potential chemical energy.
See Skeptoid number 87 for claims of running your car on water.
Pantone's business venture did not go well for him.
He was hit by both the state of Utah and the federal government with multiple fraud charges by lying to his investors and failing to disclose other criminal charges against him.
He was convicted but found mentally incompetent and served out his sentence in the Utah State Hospital.
Upon his release, he went deep into the survivalist and militia cultures and continued selling his GEET until his death in 2015.
Today, YouTubers build them and show them off, still believing they're going to save the world.
And it's clear that the GEET's components are the same as Bendel's device, just shaped differently.
It's worth mentioning that the inspiration for both guys may have been a Frenchman named Jean Chamberlain who was building such systems in the 1970s.
However, I didn't find much about him.
Although Bendel is an Australian, his company for making and selling the TG, Plasmoid Power, is located in Thailand.
We don't know why, but we can speculate.
It's likely that Bendel knows he's violating Pantone's patent, and Thailand famously does not respect American patents.
Also, it's almost certain that Bendel knows about the legal hot water Pantone got into by soliciting investors with false claims about his product.
And Bendel has his own troubled past in Australia to worry about.
Something else that doesn't matter in Thailand.
His previous career was masquerading as an oil man.
Claiming he received a vision from God about vast oil reserves in Tasmania, an island known for its complete lack of exploitable liquid oil reserves, Bendel formed a company and raised millions of dollars from some 16,000 investors, and then allowed his 10-year oil exploration license to expire without ever having actually sunk a well.
He kept all the investors' money anyway.
So my advice to anyone considering investing in his current venture, or even just purchasing one of his devices, should exercise extreme caution.
Here's what I mean.
The first chamber of a TG is called the pre-ionization chamber.
A Skeptical Sea Adventure 00:02:34
It sucks in air which flows past a 25-watt white compact fluorescent light bulb, the kind with a long tube wound into a spiral bulb shape.
Bendel claims this ionizes the air, which is absolutely false.
Even assuming the bulb is the type designed to produce UV, which lacks the protective internal phosphor coating, the full spectrum of light from such a bulb produces photons with some 3 to 5 electron volts of energy.
The minimum energy level for an ionizing photon is greater than 10 electron volts, corresponding to a wavelength less than 124 millimeters.
This type of bulb cannot produce that.
So it cannot ionize any air molecules passing through this cylinder.
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Engine Efficiency Myths Explained 00:06:58
The second chamber is called the plasmoid generator, which is where that not actually ionized air bubbles up through an aquarium stone in water.
Bindle uses one definition of a real plasmoid as his inspiration.
When a cavitation bubble in water collapses violently, a transient plasma structure might briefly exist.
And this is one type of plasmoid.
Bindle says that exotic forces inside the aquarium chamber cause this kind of cavitation, similar to how cavitation takes place inside a Rank-Hilsch vortex tube.
Now, this is a real thing, but it requires 80 to 100 psi of suction.
The vacuum provided by an internal combustion engine, however, which is what drives the entire TG, is only about 4 to 10 psi, about the same as two people sucking on straws.
It is nowhere near the energy level needed to cause cavitation.
So in addition to the ionization chamber not ionizing anything, the plasmoid generator does not generate any plasmoids.
The final component, supposedly the very most exotic, feeds the intake air through a pipe inside a larger pipe through which the engine's hot exhaust gases go, thus heating it up.
It's simply a heat exchanger, with the net effect of warming the intake air.
This is despite pages and pages of pseudo-scientific babble claiming all kinds of things are going on in there.
Transmutations, nuclear effects, quantum physics.
Nope, it's a heat exchanger.
So here is what the Thunderstorm Generator is actually doing.
And I'll open with a proviso.
This only works with an old-fashioned engine.
Think of one on a lawnmower or a generator that lacks the modern computer control of a car engine.
Take a bare bones engine, either two-stroke or four-stroke, that has a simple air intake, a simple exhaust, and a basic mechanical carburetor.
This is the only engine where an add-on like the TG or the GEET is useful.
All of this works because a piston engine is basically like a big air pump.
Once the engine is running conventionally, you can switch on the TG.
The engine's vacuum sucks in air through the first useless chamber, the second, which adds a small amount of water vapor, through the heat exchanger, which warms it all up, and into the engine's intake manifold.
Both the water vapor and the warmer intake have positive and negative effects on engine performance, but generally, depending on engine load and temperature, the positive effects dominate.
So if you are to attend a thunderstorm generator demonstration and you see improved numbers either in fuel efficiency or in exhaust gas cleanliness, it's probably true, so long as those numbers represent small incremental gains and are not outrageous game changers.
But let's not get too far ahead.
Here is what each of those two effects does.
The additional heat of the mixture can improve fuel vaporization and atomization.
This results in improved combustion efficiency with more complete burning of the fuel.
At certain engine conditions, this can improve engine efficiency, but at the cost of power output.
The TG does this warming with the hot exhaust heat exchanger.
Modern engines do it by channeling exhaust gases through passages in the intake manifold, called an exhaust heat riser.
The TG can add this same function to a lawnmower engine.
Anything else like a modern car is already several steps ahead of that.
The added moisture from the water vapor displaces oxygen molecules, hampering combustion.
The moisture has only deleterious effects on combustion efficiency, but it does have one benefit.
By lowering combustion temperatures, it reduces the amount of nitrogen oxide and carbon monoxide produced.
Not enormously, but significantly.
If you see claims of improved exhaust gas cleanliness, this is the extent of it.
Greenhouse gases like CO2 are not reduced.
Some installations of the Wendell Thunderstorm Generator or the GEET device include some exhaust gases in that intake mix.
This has the potential to shake up the numbers quite a lot.
Today, all modern car engines do this.
It's called EGR, exhaust gas recirculation.
Exhaust contains inert gases that are already the result of a burn and cannot burn again, so they displace intake oxygen, reducing its availability for engine combustion.
This forces a leaner burn in the cylinder.
Under certain engine load and temperature, improvements to efficiency and exhaust cleanliness can approach double digits, though always at the expense of power.
What's important to remember is that these variables are fixed and not adjustable with a bolt-on system like the TG or GEET.
But a modern engine computer is adapting these plus other variables in real time, according to the engine state at every microsecond.
This is why the world will not be upended by the allegedly stupendous discoveries of the TG and the GEET.
Engine computers left bolt-on systems in the dust in 1972 when Chrysler introduced electronic ignition systems.
And they've been improving throughout the half-century plus ever since.
There's another reason such a setup is not in widespread use, and that's that it depends almost entirely on the engine's load.
The TG and the GEET are both driven completely by the engine's vacuum draw.
This is at its highest when the engine is under no load, basically just idling, and it's at its lowest when the engine is under the most load, and when added efficiencies could make the most difference.
But under such minimal vacuum, the TG and GEET basically stop working.
So they're only useful to the engine, paradoxically, when the engine is not doing anything useful for you.
Needless to say, none of the pseudoscience techno jargon and new age babble in the world don't change the fact that Malcolm Bendel's earth-shattering invention is just an exhaust heat riser and a water injection system, which we've known about for more than 100 years.
And it's all based on a patent from a 1980s mental patient.
Why the TG Fails 00:03:11
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