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INVENTOR PLANNING HYDROGEN·POWERED CAR Los Angeles, 20 April -Sam Leslie Leach, the invemor of aCOlllroversial process that he contends can economically separate the hydrogen and oxygen in water, says he has refined his design and! begun building a system that will be capable of running an automobile on hydrogen derived from water. Mr Leach's invention has been the sub­ ject of both mystery and controversy since he said in 1976 that he had devised an eco­ nomically efficient mj:aIls of splitting water, a contention that promised a cheap source of hydrogen as a replacement for fossil fuel. Mr Leach, a multimillionaire profession­ al/inventor who has several basic ipatentsin the field of optics, has been trying to inter­ est the federal government and industry in his concept for more than three years, but has been largely ignored. For the most part, scientists have ridiculed the concept, arguing that it violat­ ed basic laws of physics. Any system of spljtti:Qg water, they contend, has to con­ sume more energy than it produces. Positive Ev!)luation Mr Leach has refused to discuss the details of his system 01' how it purportedly works. But last spdng an innovation research centre at the University of Oregon, financed by the NatipJ)a~ Science Foundation, evaluated part of the technolo­ gy over a period of two weeks and con­ cluded than, based on its analysis, it did not violate the laws of physics or thermody­ namics. The centre said that the process appeared! to be te-chnkally sound and have commer­ cial potential, but its report did not dampen scepticism in the scientific community. Two critics 'of the system, Howard Riese and Donald Bunker, both professors at the University of California, argued, for exam­ ple, that it was impossible for such a sys­ tem to work as Mr Leach contends because, in effect, it would be a "perpetual motion machine". [he inventor denies such a characterisation. In an interview, Mr Leach said that he had declined to make public any details GECEMBER .,993 -JANUARY 1994 until he had protected his rights to ,the process. Last fall, he received a patent on some elements of the process. Last week, a second was issued by the United States Patent Office. After its issuance he agreed! to give some details of how the system pur­ portedly works. How System Operates In its simplest terms, he said!, the process utilises a laser-like device to generate ultra­ violet radiation that photochemically splits ste.am into oxygen and bydrogen. It then utilises the electrostatic forces that normal­ ly bind electrons and protons in water vapour (and which are released in the water-splitting action) to maintain the reac­ tion. In 1922, Niels Bohr, the Danish theoreti­ cal physicist, first defined the electrostatic forces that bind electrons and protons as "extranuclear" energy. Mr Leach's con­ 'ten,tion that he has found a way to use the energy ,in the way he describes is likely to evoke additional scepticism from other sci­ entists. But he asserrs that the process he utilises 10 maintain the water-splitting action is identical with one observed by astronomers in energy interactions that occur in gaseous nebulae, the great masses of interstellar gas that absorb ultraviolet radiation from stars and re-emit it as visible light. The follow­ ,ing is a more detailed account of how Mr II [THE OqOI'''S SOuP 1$ H tftfi: .. m-e.