May 5, 2007 #51 E ERD50 Give me a museum and I'll fill it. (Picasso) Give me a forum ... Joined Sep 13, 2005 Messages 26,914 Location Northern IL TromboneAl said: From an editorial I read today... Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles. The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare. Click to expand... T-Al, I came across a forum discussing that article with the author. Can't find the link now, but the whole article fell apart very quickly under a little inspection. A few points I recall: The author *assumes* that the hummer will last 300,000 and the Prius only 100,000 - so everything on the Hummer gets amortized over 3x the lifespan, making everything related to the Prius look 3x worse. Why 300,000 vs 100,000? Because the prius batteries are warranted for 100,000. Hmmm, what is the warranty on a Hummer? Vehicles don't live past their warranty? So, pretty fishy from the get-go. Next, the author makes a big calculation on the environmental impact of shipping the nickel from Canada to Japan and back to the USA for sale in the car. But, he assumes everything in a Hummer is locally home-grown, w/o any data to back it up. Third, he focuses on that nickel mine (only a small portion of the nickel produced in that mine goes into Prius batteries) but does no research on any environmental impacts of materials that go into a Hummer. And, obviously, that mine has been in operation longer than Prius has been around. Does he provide any references or show his calculations for peer review? Nope. All in all, it is a hatchet job, and done with a pretty dull instrument. The guy just wants to defend his use of a Hummer. -ERD50
TromboneAl said: From an editorial I read today... Building a Toyota Prius causes more environmental damage than a Hummer that is on the road for three times longer than a Prius. As already noted, the Prius is partly driven by a battery which contains nickel. The nickel is mined and smelted at a plant in Sudbury, Ontario. This plant has caused so much environmental damage to the surrounding environment that NASA has used the ‘dead zone’ around the plant to test moon rovers. The area around the plant is devoid of any life for miles. The plant is the source of all the nickel found in a Prius’ battery and Toyota purchases 1,000 tons annually. Dubbed the Superstack, the plague-factory has spread sulfur dioxide across northern Ontario, becoming every environmentalist’s nightmare. Click to expand... T-Al, I came across a forum discussing that article with the author. Can't find the link now, but the whole article fell apart very quickly under a little inspection. A few points I recall: The author *assumes* that the hummer will last 300,000 and the Prius only 100,000 - so everything on the Hummer gets amortized over 3x the lifespan, making everything related to the Prius look 3x worse. Why 300,000 vs 100,000? Because the prius batteries are warranted for 100,000. Hmmm, what is the warranty on a Hummer? Vehicles don't live past their warranty? So, pretty fishy from the get-go. Next, the author makes a big calculation on the environmental impact of shipping the nickel from Canada to Japan and back to the USA for sale in the car. But, he assumes everything in a Hummer is locally home-grown, w/o any data to back it up. Third, he focuses on that nickel mine (only a small portion of the nickel produced in that mine goes into Prius batteries) but does no research on any environmental impacts of materials that go into a Hummer. And, obviously, that mine has been in operation longer than Prius has been around. Does he provide any references or show his calculations for peer review? Nope. All in all, it is a hatchet job, and done with a pretty dull instrument. The guy just wants to defend his use of a Hummer. -ERD50
