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[martinuzz]

Yeah, there is definitely blame to be placed on collaborating Dutch nazi sympathisers amongst civil service and police. We hanged some of them when we were liberated, and shaved their wives' heads. Some more were sentenced to prison in the years after that. A lot of them never met justice though.

[Iduno]

Officially changing your race is unwise though. It can endager your life. Various races need various medical treatments because of biochemical genetic differences.
Same for gender btw. Always tell a doctor your birth gender, not your chosen gender.

I figure your medical records should already contain details on medicinal gender/sex, so doctors won’t have to use unreliable non-medical records when you need a treatment. Or do you not have a national medical records system in the Netherlands? Either way this issue of medicinal sex not matching legal documents should not be a new one, if changing your legal gender was difficult before there should be plenty of trans people with their assigned-at-birth gender on their passports but who are more or less transitioned, thus causing a mismatch between the medical/legal already. Even ignoring trans people, being intersex of various degrees is more common than most people think, and there you need records to not mess up treatments. The binary sex model is simply a pretty unhefty one, one I hope doctors don’t use straight up.

They still use BMI even though that's been discredited for decades. Plus, I'm not sure what they would do with gender information even if they got it right; most medical studies exclude women because it doesn't get the results they want without extra work.

[martinuzz]

Our new government decided to build two new nuclear power plants.
Currently we have 6 nuclear facilities; one operational nuclear power plant (Borssele, built in 1969-1973), one that has been decomissioned and covered in concrete in 1997 (Dodenwaard) and 4 nuclear facilities for research, medical isotopes, uranium enrichment, and long term nuclear waste depository.
Our single active nuclear plant produces 4% of our national energy needs.

I am ambivalent. While I acknowledge the nuclear waste problem, and believe no one can assure safe depository for the hundreds of thousands of years needed, I also believe that they are essential for the transition away from fossil fuels, and even more essential for becoming less dependent on Russia for our energy needs, especially now Germany has shut down all it's nuclear plants.

The plan is to have the 2 new reactors operational in 2030.

[dragdeler]

a

[Madman198237]

Nuclear power is incredibly safe and cheap compared to other options as is obviously if you look at the numbers. It is inexpensive because of the INCREDIBLE power density of the fuel. It's a hell of a lot of money to BUILD the plant, but after that it's, compared to natural gas or coal, almost free to fuel, so an operating nuclear reactor rakes in money at a ludicrous rate. The reason they require subsidies is because investors are short-sighted and don't want to wait five to ten years for their investment to start raking in the money, and they fear the costs associated with the periodic refurbishment, reconditioning, and upgrades to the reactors.

Nuclear waste is certainly not dealt with appropriately but people believe that it's a lot worse than it actually is. In terms of volume there's not actually that much of it produced and if someone just bothered it'd be done. The big problem is just the longevity and even then unless you're sleeping with the cask under your bed, uncontained waste would do no more than increasing your risk of cancer. Everyone foolishly worries about burying these things and then somehow forgetting about it, perhaps instead we should just worry about keeping our civilization going so that we don't need to worry about telling some hypothetical survived-the-apocalypse-and-forgot-everything group of people about the dangers posed by the steel drums in the deep?

The idea that a nuclear power plant would suffer a large enough disaster to render Central Europe uninhabitable is...divorced from reality. Chernobyl was the worst possible nuclear reactor accident, and it has rendered barely a few square kilometers 'uninhabitable', and that level of disaster happened only in a reactor with what are, by modern standards, unthinkably lax safety standards in the reactor's basic design.

Fukushima is an EXCELLENT study in how well modern reactors can cope even with situations the designers didn't plan for, even if they should have planned for the combination of earthquake-related power failure and tsunami.

[dragdeler]

a

[martinuzz]

Luckily the japanese were able to deflect the brunt of the blow into the ocean, should be no issue in the future.

Up until somewhere halfway the 1980s, every nuclear plant in the world just dumped it's radioactive waste in the ocean, not to mention all the nuclear bomb testing on islands. No fluorescent octhulupusses have risen yet. The ocean is pretty damn good at diluting stuff.

EDIT: This does not mean that I am in favour of dumping nuclear waste in the oceans

[dragdeler]

a

[Madman198237]

I'm not going to break the quotes apart because I'm busy, but:

1. It doesn't need to stay hermetically sealed, it simply needs to adequately isolate the spent fuel rods with maintenance. So long as human civilization doesn't literally stop functioning we can just, y'know, maintain a proper waste facility and not worry about it surviving an apocalypse.

Inexpensive is a relative term, obviously. Inexpensive in terms of power density and energy per dollar, not the actual cost of a single fuel rod or ton of processed uranium. And nuclear power IS incredibly cheap...once the reactor is built.

When I say "in terms of volume" I mean "in terms of volume"; as in, the actual physical space that nuclear waste takes up. The principal means of isolation is a 55 gallon steel drum with filler material packed in around the depleted uranium stored at a good long distance from human habitation.

Even in the red zones the consequences are "elevated risk of cancer". That's extremely bad for sure, but the odds of a full Chernobyl happening ever again are pretty close to zero.

Do explain how a reactor accident could be worse than Chernobyl without leaving the bounds of reality, please. There really aren't many, if any at all.

Oh I get it. Far, far more than anyone arguing against nuclear power does. I quite like nuclear power as I have read up quite a bit on the subject. It's fascinating, and incredibly useful.


Dumping nuclear waste into the deepest parts of the ocean is...not the worst option actually? Like, the ocean really could dilute the tiny amount (on the geological scale) of nuclear material we could ever use down to basically nothing. The principal problem is basically that nobody wants the solution to be "just chuck it into the oceans" because, well, that solution generally sucks for most things you might want to use it on, like trash. But properly encased nuclear waste won't float, and by the time it makes it back to the surface (if it ever does) it'd be so dispersed that it wouldn't even measurably raise the background radiation.

[Egan_BW]

but what if it mutates the water molecules into brain eating water monsters

[Madman198237]

I'd be more worried about what it's going to do to the radiotrophs and other weird creatures down there on the ocean's floor in the deepest trenches.

We might create our own Great Old Ones or something

[dragdeler]

a

[Il Palazzo]

These are only worse in the sense that you've added a scary concept in front of nuclear disaster. You need to be more specific - what is the physical way that can disseminate the nuclear material better than exposed, burning, molten core. Most kinds of damage you can do to a reactor will shut down the reaction, and at worst you end up with large chunks of radioactively hot material scattered around the installation instead of a continent-spanning fallout. For terrorists to cause something like Chernobyl, they'd pretty much have to apply for a job there in the 80s, and do exactly what the crew had done.

[Madman198237]

Those are not valid categories of "how bad it can get" because they're not caused by the reactor. That's an absurd argument. You might as well argue that solar power isn't valid because an asteroid strike or the declaration of World War 3 or a supervolcano could shut down all solar power across the globe with the nuclear/volcanic/asteroid-caused winter. In fact it's even more ridiculous than that, because at least there there's an actual property of the power source being caused to fail!

If a nuclear plant gets hit by any of those, is it going to cause more damage than Chernobyl? The answer in the first case is a laughable "how often do you think that could possibly happen?" and then a "no, because the plant's been VAPORIZED"; the second is a "depends on how they do it but probably not", the third we've seen doesn't cause even Chernobyl-level meltdowns, and warfare is likely not going to target the reactors directly because most people are not stupid enough to literally salt the earth by risking even a small radioactive escape when they could just cut the power lines leading from the plant and be done with.

In short, you've confused "insanity/improbability/lunacy/destructiveness" of the CAUSE with the destruction caused by a potential failure. I didn't want you to tell me the various ways a reactor could be made to fail, I asked for a mechanism by which the failure could cause more destruction than the Chernobyl meltdown.

Is it fair to outsource to the future? I mean, if we keep using nuclear reactors then the future is just going to keep the reprocessing and storage facilities running, even ignoring the many, many advances in reactor technology that help to vastly reduce the problem. As for just relying on future maintenance, well, yeah, it isn't the "fairest" but then how many future generations are already on the hook for global warming and its consequences or industrial pollution and whatnot? If we can cut down on the pollution and global warming with nuclear power then we're reducing the problems for the future generations, not making them worse. And as reactor technology and others advance, we should relatively quickly be able to permanently eliminate the problem.

Most rare-earth-element mining has serious and problematic impacts on environment and human populations, they're systemic issues that need to be fixed regardless of whether it's uranium or the various elements that make up computer chips. We aren't going to stop using computer chips over it, we shouldn't stop using nuclear power over it.

Saying "they might cut corners" is an argument against doing LITERALLY ANYTHING, and not one I find particularly compelling, since it is inarguable. Yeah, people do stupid crap quite often, is that a good reason to not do something that is otherwise excellent?


Been ninja'd by a shorter way to say the same thing, but whatever.

[delphonso]

dragdeler, the very real other side of this coin is that nuclear power is necessary in reaction to climate change.

Hydro is the only green tech that supplies consistant and slowly scalable power (as in, you can allow more or less water to pass over turbines at different hours in relation to demand). Solar and wind are reliable, but out of our control when it comes to slowly scaling output. Even with a substantial power grid and storage, we're going to need an additional slow source of energy.

Your options for that are fossil fuels or nuclear. Whatever reservations and objections you have, it's obvious that nuclear is preferable to even natural gas.