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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. Leach says the system works: The reaction is started with an input of electrical energy from outside the system, from a battery or electric line. This energy is converted, by using an "optical pump" and other components, into large amounts of ultraviolet radiation of a specific wave- length that is precisely tailored to ionise hydrogen and oxygen molecules in the steam that has been fed into a tubular reac- tion chamber. The chamber is flooded with the radia- tion. During the ionisation, electrons are momentarily liberated from their atoms and molecules. INVENTOR PLANNING HYDROGEN-POWERED CAR Los Angeles, 20 April — Sam Leslie Leach, the inventor of a controversial 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 means 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 patents in 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 splitting water, they contend, has to con- sume more energy than it produces. How System Operates In its simplest terms, he said, the process utilises a laser-like device to generate ultra- violet radiation that photochemically splits steam into oxygen and hydrogen. 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- tention 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 asserts that the process he utilises to 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 Microseconds later they are recaptured and recombined with the proton or nucleus of the atom. At this point, the energy that was required to ionise it reappears and radi- ates away. This radiation then ionises another mole- cule. Very soon a chain reaction begins that involves millions of molecules and atoms. The process's concept, Mr Leach said, manipulates the recombination of electrons and protons as hydrogen and oxygen instead of water vapour. Some of the hydrogen, he said, can be used to generate electricity to continue the initial input to the process and, in effect, be SELF-SUS- TAINING AS LONG AS WATER IS Positive Evaluation Mr Leach has refused to discuss the details of his system or how it purportedly works. But last spring an innovation research centre at the University of Oregon, financed by the National Science Foundation, evaluated part of the technolo- gy over a period of two weeks and con- cluded that, based on its analysis, it did not violate the laws of physics or thermody- namics. The centre said that the process appeared to be technically 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". The inventor denies such a characterisation. In an interview, Mr Leach said that he had declined to make public any details NEXUS¢53 Jonisation and Radiation DECEMBER 1993 - JANUARY 1994