Toyota factory turns landscape to arid wilderness

Oh, Yea, and the Prius has been made for a century now. From the above article:

"from a Canadian company whose smelting facility at Sudbury has spewed sulphur dioxide into the air for more than a century."

He could have titled this article "Eating Utensiles, Surgical tools, Railway Cariages, Jet Engines and Stainless Steel turns landscape into Poisoned Wasteland", but I guess that the reporter would not have been as well rewarded for a more truthful attitude. Ever wonder why your spoon you are eating your cerial with does not rust ? Nickel !

This guy is either a technological ignoramous, a journalistic incompetent (did not do his research) or a tool of the status quo intent on a hatchet job.

There is no mention of the total life cycle evaluation of materials that Toyota does. Nor the fact that they have built a factory to recycle the batteries to avoid having to mine more nickel. Or that most cars have stainless steel exhausts systems now, and for about at least 15 years. Or that Toyota has already said they are changing to Lithium Ion batteries. Or even that allot of those continous web processed solar cells going on German roof tops are deposited on, you guessed it, stainless steel. Or that chemical plants, including Oil Refineries are forrests of stainless steel piping.

Here is a link with some background on stainless steel: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stainless_steel . Check out the totals on the St. Louis Gateway arch and Petronis tower - there are few Prius batteries worth of Nickel! Let alone all the railway cars (Budd Industries). Each aircraft turbine engine has a good amount of nickel in it - the superalloys in turbine blades are nickel based, with smaller amounts of alloying metals: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superalloy

 

Yeah there was the GeoMetro also but both cars are considerably smaller than our Prius. I suppose if they made a hybrid version of those we would get around 70-80 mpg but then how many people would buy them? The Honda Insight is not very versitile. I got the Prius because it was a compromise between a large passenger vehicle and a small commuter car.

 

Troll alert

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Tadashi @ Nov 23 2006, 11:09 PM) [snapback]353642[/snapback]</div>

I drove a Geo Metro for a number of years and on the highway it did get ~55 mpg (although back when I was driving it on the highway, the speed limit may have been 55 mph), however, the power and space in the Prius vastly exceeds that of the Geo Metro. After all, it had a 1.0 liter 3 cylinder engine. Not a bad little car, but I'd never take it back in place of my Prius. I doubt that the overall mileage of the Metro was as good as the overall mileage of the Prius.

Dave M.

 

I find it really humours that the Canadian Nickel was the cause of the landscape destruction and the Prius takes the blame. How "F'n" stupid is the author of this article.

 

Don't feed the troll. Go back under your bridge, troll! It's not even a Toyota plant. It's a nickel smelting plant. Nobody knows if Toyota bought nickel from that plant.

Nate

 

Does this mean we should boycott the 5¢ coin, AKA the "nickel?" :blink:

 

Of the annual global production of nickel, about 0.3% goes into Prius NiMH batteries, as near as I can figure. It is perhaps of interest that these batteries are expected to be a high percentage recycled, when they eventually lose their capacity. So it might be argued that these batteries 'demand-neutral'. In any event one would be foolish to not recycle them, given the current (and rising) price of the metal.

Also of interest is that this minor use of nickel is one that actually reduces downstream pollution, as they are used to make combustion engine vehicles less polluting. Perhaps there are other (even larger) applications of nickel in pollution reduction? None immediately come to my mind.

Meanwhile, the nickel industry is struggling to keep up with demand, primarily for stainless steel. New mines planned or being developed are mainly in tropical areas that I personally would prefer to see not cleared. However even after hybrid vehicles change to lithium based batteries, the demand for stainless steel will continue, and said forests are almost certainly doomed. Kind of a shame.

The shame rests with all of us for being profligate consumers I suppose. Mining and smelting and combustion drive the 'engines of economic development', at least this is the past and present of development. But to lay it at the feet of hybrid vehicles makes no sense to me.

Might add that steel production is not the world's cleanest industry either. So one could consider the larger numbers of sport utility vehicles that seem much heavier than actually required for most of their buyers. Steel from vehicles is currently about 70% recycled so it is not a "leak-free" cycle. Not the cleanest in terms of air pollution. I could go on...

Pick your own products to hate, but choose wisely.

 

The Daily Mail newspaper has lowered itself over the years to become a rag that's a point away from gutter press - those that have to rely on journalistic sensationalism to sell papers - or if there isn't any news, invent it.
I stopped reading the Mail about 12 years ago.
Anyhow, if the 'writer' had been worth his salt he would have tempered his article with some of the points made above !

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Charles Suitt @ Nov 25 2006, 10:33 AM) [snapback]353963[/snapback]</div>

up untill about 1967 or 8 somewhere around there the "nickel" was actually nickel, but when the price jumped around then the coin was worth more for the nickel than the coin value, and there was a great bussiness in taking them out of circulation and melting them down for items like jewelery and plating etc. so the government decided to replace the nickel "nickel" with an alloy coin. You still finded them every now and then in your change but for the most part they're long gone. In 1974 I had a neighbour in the north that actually had his furnace weighted down with bags and bags of them. Then as the Hunt brothers tried to corner the nickel market he unloaded them.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(Frank Hudon @ Nov 25 2006, 03:26 PM) [snapback]354040[/snapback]</div>

Somewhat off topic, but nickel is a ferromagnetic material and I have some very strong magnets (about 1.2 T) that make great stud finders. Within an inch of a nail, they practically jump to it. The current "nickel" coin isn't affected any more than a penny is by one of these magnets.

Dave M.

 

Life in these Middle Ages is a bitch. Not too long from now we'll be mining asteroids for iron and nickel, making finished goods in space and shipping them down to a nice clean Earth. We could start working toward this on Monday if we had the vision and the will.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(tochatihu @ Nov 25 2006, 02:03 PM) [snapback]353979[/snapback]</div>

Well put.

The Sudbury Nickel plant (and the world-famous Sudbury Nickel) have been there a while.

Further, the use of nickel in autos is not new.

I was trying to calculate how the Prius compared to other cars, in terms of lsb of nickel but didn't get very far. Sart with about 22 lbs of Ni in a Prius battery, consistent with other data suggesting that 24% of the weight of a typical NiMH battery is Ni. Beyond that, the only hard fact I could find is that the largest use of Canadian nickel is in building cars in the US.

So, all cars use nickel. Does the Prius use more nickel than the average US car?

I could not find a hard number, but it was not clear that it does or does not It looks like the average modern car has in the neighborhood of 40 - 50 lbs of nickel in various alloys and plating. I'd guess a fair bit of that is in the exhaust system. Given that the Prius (2900 lbs) weighs less than the typical US passenger vehicle (currently about 3750 lbs), and that the engine (and therefore exhaust) is tiny by current standards, it's not clear that a Prius uses more nickel than the typical conventional US passenger vehicle.

So, not only has that nickel smelter been there a while, cars have been using nickel for a while, and given the weight and configuration of the Prius, it's not even clear that the Prius uses more nickel than the average car. It would take a fair bit of detailed data to demonstrate that on net, a 2900 lb car with a small engine and 22 lbs if Ni in the battery uses more nickel than a 3750 lb converntional modern passenger vehicle.

 

<div class='quotetop'>QUOTE(bh696 @ Nov 23 2006, 10:59 PM) [snapback]353597[/snapback]</div>

Possibly the single stupidest article I've ever read.