Wendyl Nissen has created a niche for herself and given herself the self aggrandizing title of “The Green Goddess”.
Every day on NewstalkZB and presumably on other radion station you get to listen to her utterly trite advert touting for Toyota Prius vehicles and Giltrap City Toyota.
It makes me want to spew that people like her tout such utter rubbish. It has finally motivated me enough to get angry about the lies she spouts.
Here are some facts that should make her hair stand on end.
Each electric Prius motor requires 1 kilogram (2.2 lb) of neodymium, and each battery uses 10 to 15 kg (22-33 lb) of lanthanum. That number will nearly double under Toyota’s plans to boost the car’s fuel economy
So lets look at just those two components, and lets ignore that you have to mine the raw material first up to even get to process it. We will also ignore the syntheic tyres, the composite plastics and every other chemical in these cars and focus on just two small components. I will highlight the non green parts of her “very green Toyota Prius”.
Neodymium is never found in nature as the free element; rather, it occurs in ores such as monazite and bastnäsite that contain small amounts of all the rare earth metals. The main mining areas are China, United States, Brazil, India, Sri Lanka and Australia; and reserves of neodymium are estimated at about 8 million tonnes
Neodymium metal dust is a combustion and explosion hazard. Neodymium compounds, as with all rare earth metals, are of low to moderate toxicity; however its toxicity has not been thoroughly investigated. Neodymium dust and salts are very irritating to the eyes and mucous membranes, and moderately irritating to skin. Breathing the dust can cause lung embolisms, and accumulated exposure damages the liver. Neodymium also acts as an anticoagulant…
Gee, nice stuff….certainly not a benign chemical…could even qualify as a “nasty chemical”. The second item is Lanthanum.
Lanthanum is most commonly obtained from monazite and bastnäsite. The mineral mixtures are crushed and ground. Monazite, because of its magnetic properties, can be separated by repeated electromagnetic separation. After separation, it is treated with hot concentrated sulfuric acid to produce water-soluble sulfates of rare earths. The acidic filtrates are partially neutralized with sodium hydroxide to pH 3-4. Thorium precipitates out of solution as hydroxide and is removed. After that, the solution is treated with ammonium oxalate to convert rare earths to their insoluble oxalates. The oxalates are converted to oxides by annealing. The oxides are dissolved in nitric acid that excludes one of the main components, cerium, whose oxide is insoluble in HNO3. Lanthanum is separated as a double salt with ammonium nitrate by crystallization. This salt is relatively less soluble than other rare earth double salts and therefore stays in the residue.
Gee…more “nasty chemicals”, used to manufacture a key component of the Toyota Prius. Her “very green” car is looking decidedly sick.
One by-product of the manufacturing process is Thorium, a naturally occurring, slightly radioactivemetal. horium, as well as uranium and plutonium, can be used as fuel in a nuclear reactor. Cool, her “very green car” now produces a by-product for the nuclear industry.
A secondary by-product is also Cerium which:
like all rare-earth metals, is of low to moderate toxicity. Cerium is a strong reducing agent and ignites spontaneously in air at 65 to 80 °C. Fumes from cerium fires are toxic. Water should not be used to stop cerium fires, as cerium reacts with water to produce hydrogen gas. Workers exposed to cerium have experienced itching, sensitivity to heat, and skin lesions. Animals injected with large doses of cerium have died due to cardiovascular collapse. Cerium(IV) oxide is a powerful oxidizing agent at high temperatures and will react with combustible organic materials. While cerium is not radioactive, the impure commercial grade may contain traces of thorium, which is radioactive.
All of this makes Wendyl Nissen a class A hypocrite, or an idiot.
For me, I don’t care what goes into a care or what is dug out of the ground and subjected to extremely toxic chemical processes to make one thing or another. But then again, I am not preaching about how green I am or how I hate “toxic chemicals” all the time touting for a car made from extremely toxic substances.
The best part though is this;
The chemical compound ammonium nitrate, the nitrate of ammonia with the chemical formula NH4NO3, is a white crystalline solid at room temperature and standard pressure. It is commonly used in agriculture as a high-nitrogen fertilizer, and it has also been used as an oxidizing agent in explosives, including improvised explosive devices. It is the main component of ANFO, a very popular explosive.
The Green Goddess, who likes “everything, and I mean everything” natural and organic is using a car that uses substantial quantities of a fertilser that she herself , being an organic gardener, would never put on her garden and is also a key component in a very popular commercial explosive, not to mention the explosive used to bring down the Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building in Oklahoma, killing 168 peopl including 19 children. Green Goddess?…more like supporter of terrorist weapons of mass desrtuction.
I guess hypocrisy for Greens doesn’t matter, still its better than catching your husband gobbling cock I suppose.
