Energy Flashes: Fuel & Energy Alternatives

Here are short articles on Big V-8, electrical energy consumption, geothermal energy, fuel of the future, ammonia-powered car, heat pump, Nancy May and her can of gasoline.

March/April 1974

If your big V-8 drinks too much gas, just cut it in two. That's the approach used by Joe Lawyer, a mechanic at the Jim Clark Chrysler-Plymouth agency in Topeka, Kansas. Lawyer reworks an eight-cylinder engine's carburetor, modifies its valve train and makes other adjustments so that the powerplant becomes a "V-4." The unused pistons are left in place to act as a second flywheel and people who don't know about the modification often pick one of the reworked engines as "sounding smoother" than a standard V-8. The idea, which is really nothing new (it was used during the fuel rationing days of World War II), is said to jump the economy of a 1974 Plymouth Fury from 13 to as high as 20.6 miles per gallon.

Phooey on industry projections that endlessly tell us we must double our consumption of electrical energy every 8-12 years. No less an authority than the Rand Corporation recently stated that better insulation in houses and other simple measures can cut California's projected demand for electricity in the year 2000 by as much as 65%. Hooray (for once) for the Rand Corporation.

Geothermal energy (see Mother Earth News' first report on the subject way back in iss. no. 11), long scoffed at by the pushers of "modern" atomic power, may win out in the end. A National Science Foundation report indicates that the U.S. could, by 1985, be tapping geothermal energy equal to more than 100 of the largest nuclear plants in operation.

Although the Atomic Energy Commission (AEC) and certain fuzzy-minded politicians continue to tout nuclear energy as the "fuel of the future," destined to make the U.S. "energy self-sufficient" by such and such a date, an increasing number of knowledgeable scientists now think otherwise. Growing evidence indicates that the net gain of usable power from atomic reactors is very small. Nuclear energy's future, in other words, depends quite heavily on the availability of fossil fuels, and once those are gone, it's goodbye atomic energy. This, of course, says nothing at all about the tremendously serious safety problems that nuclear power presents and which the AEC can no longer hide. We may well become energy self-sufficient within the next 15 to 25 years, but it will be geothermal, solar and other so-called "alternative" power sources, with strong help from conservation programs, that do it.

"We've got a car that operates well on ammonia, " says Dr. Jeffery Hodgson, of the Mechanical and Aerospace Engineering Department at the University of Tennessee, "but ammonia is getting to be as scarce as gasoline and it produces emissions that are difficult to control. Everyone talks about powering automobiles with hydrogen, but hauling around a lot of liquid hydrogen under pressure and refrigeration presents problems that no one has figured a way to handle. And you wouldn't want a car sitting in a garage with a hydrogen leak. Really, gasoline is just about the ideal fuel for the family automobile."

A wind-driven heat pump might well extract enough warmth from a 200-square-meter field, 2 1/2 feet below the earth's surface, to heat an average house. Then again, according to Cambridge University's Alexander Pike, there's no "might" to it. Pike knows a man in Norwich, England who's been heating his home this way (with an electrically driven pump) for 20 years. Anyone wanna try it over here?

Nancy May, a California college student, has found a sure-fire way of getting a lift as she thumbs her way between home and school. When hitchhiking, she takes along a can of gasoline and a sign imprinted with the words, "HAVE GAS." Fuel short motorists rarely pass her by