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GAO: DOE Is Prematurely Excluding Less Expensive Options for Nuclear Cleanup

277 points by Jimmc414 4mo ago

deleted 4mo ago
[deleted]
actionfromafar 4mo ago
Ouch. Two billion dollars. That could have been put into much better use, imagine being able to fund the Iran war for one more day.
- falcor84 4mo ago
  Why not both?
  - anonym29 4mo ago
    I can think of about 39 trillion reasons... https://www.usdebtclock.org/ https://www.usdebtclock.org/
    - deleted 4mo ago
      [deleted]
    - LoganDark 4mo ago
      How do I get rid of the weird popup that wants me to download a pdf? Edit: there's a button in the top-right that says "Secret Window"
- arjie 4mo ago
  It's funny how this kind of pricing works. A bag of weed captured is estimated at a thousand dollars. Ten movies pirated at twice that. We fire a JASSM in combat and it costs a lot of money. We fire it in training and it costs nothing. There is no financial impact estimated to require all elevators be big enough to turn a full length gurney around. A wealth tax will yield revenue for the next thirty years at 30 times what it will yield this year. $6.6 billion will end world hunger but $100 billion is better spent on a train between Bakersfield and Fresno. I bought my car for $32k. To replace it would be $50k. I crash it, am I out $32k or $50k? Or some other number? Numerically, it could be anything.
  - AnthonyMouse 4mo ago
    > A wealth tax will yield revenue for the next thirty years at 30 times what it will yield this year. Isn't this the opposite of how a wealth tax works? The annual turnover for e.g. Apple stock is ~0.4%, so a 0.8%/year wealth tax would triple the number of sellers without adding any new buyers. The negative effect on the price is outsized because most people hold long-term rather than buying or selling in any given year, but now people have to liquidate some every year in order to pay the government because you're taxing unrealized gains. And then because "wealth" is calculated as share price times number of shares, when the share price goes down, everyone's "wealth" goes down and with it next year's revenue from a wealth tax. There would be some limits on that in terms of the compounding negative effect on the share price because (among other things) if the price went down then foreign investors would find it more attractive to buy in and then they're not subject to the tax and don't have to sell every year to pay it, but causing more of the market to be owned by foreign rather than domestic taxpayers over time is also not a thing which leads to stable domestic tax revenue. > $6.6 billion will end world hunger but $100 billion is better spent on a train between Bakersfield and Fresno. The current UN estimate is more like $100 billion a year to end world hunger, whereas the initial build of a rail line is a one-time cost.
    - jquery 4mo ago
      The purpose of wealth taxes is redistributive, not revenue maximization of a spherical cow.
      - datsci_est_2015 4mo ago
        I prefer the phrasing “more liquid and efficient allocation of capital” over “wealth redistribution”.
      - AnthonyMouse 4mo ago
        What does that have to do with the revenue claim being questionable? Also, if that was the goal, wouldn't it be better to tax (or break up) the corporations rather than the shareholders? It comes out of their pocket either way, but forcing asset sales has a lot of negative consequences and bad incentives. On top of that, it handles the problem that the CEO of a huge company has too much power regardless of what percentage of the company's stock they own, by reducing the size of the company rather than their ownership stake in it.
dakolli 4mo ago
A bunch of these nuclear power startups have started reached criticality over the last week. Aalo and Valar (thiel) and now GAO is trying to loosen regulations around nuclear waste disposal.. Makes sense. Weird how we only get green energy when it's necessary for the technocratic class to power their data centers (and when they are small enough to be flown on location for the military, so the military can destroy a nations power production capabilities and still be able to power their invasions). During Valar's announcement this week regarding achieving their goals of nuclear power generation they did a tech-style keynote address where they powered a nvidia blackwell GPU and "hosted a website with it" (lol).
- lclarkmichalek 4mo ago
  Isn’t it a fairly natural (and useful) capitalist outcome that as prices rise incentives to increase supply increase? What’s technocratic about responding to a demand change?
  - dakolli 4mo ago
    because they have infiltrated the government to reduce the cost of safety, and increase the possibility of environmental harm to pad their margins... faster shit code, AI cat videos and so they can add 100ft to the length of their next boat?
    - fc417fc802 4mo ago
      > infiltrated the government That's an awfully emotionally charged way to phrase "lobbied in the same way that everyone else does". When a matter of geopolitical interest that's consuming a significant fraction of the national economy is being impeded by the current regulations it seems entirely expected that the government would start making changes. If anything refusing to make changes under those circumstances would be truly bizarre. Sure at present they also have a substantially more sympathetic admin than usual but that's the current climate that everyone is working in.
      - 4mo ago
jjk166 4mo ago
This is an excellent example of how to communicate investigation findings. The summary is clear and succinct, there are illustrative examples readily understood by a layman, the recommendations are actionable and unambiguous, and the potential impact is quantified without promising some stupidly precise estimate. I've got some customers whose quality auditors could learn a lot from this.
- chris_va 4mo ago
  To play devil's advocate, the counter argument is that it's always easy to advocate for more process, and cherry pick examples to support that conclusion. The actual report basically says that the DOE already requires that they "should identify a need without having a particular solution already in mind", so it is really just an argument that people should follow the written guidelines, and add more process to make sure it happens. The examples in the report are pretty nuanced.
  - bruckie 4mo ago
    That's about what I would expect from an organization named Government Accountability Office: hold the government accountable to its written guidelines (or at least report on how well it's doing at meeting them).
    - chris_va 4mo ago
      Yeah. I don't think the conclusion is necessarily wrong or that they shouldn't have investigated, but I also think the cost to the taxpayers might increase due to the underlying nuance. The report implies that the guidelines are correct, but doesn't really quantify the counterfactual. Again, devil's advocate
      - jjk166 4mo ago
        It is not the Auditor's job to determine that the rules are optimal, it is only to determine whether they are being followed. Presumably when the rule was instated someone had good reason to believe it would be beneficial; and if someone makes a compelling argument that following the rule is not beneficial, it should be repealed, not ignored.
freestanding 4mo ago
[flagged]
- freestanding 4mo ago
  [flagged]
Joel_Mckay 4mo ago
Sure, but has anyone ever built a container that lasts 30k years, and remains watertight? Thus far, most off-site containment storage sites over 10 years old have failed to stop containment leaks, Radon gas diffusion, or hot-material fires. Fission reactors are a 1950's loss-leader technology, and only make sense for already uninhabitable areas like space. =3
- margalabargala 4mo ago
  There are plenty of dry areas like in the American Southwest which can be projected to not have meaningful water attempt ingress in that time frame. Also, fission reactors make phenomenal sense on aircraft carriers, submarines, etc.
  - bobmcnamara 4mo ago
    We've already leached too much uranium into the groundwater for many to drink just from the mining alone.
    - iamnothere 4mo ago
      We’ve also already depleted many aquifers past the point of recovery. We have too many people to hydrate, too many crops to water in order to feed them, and not enough water. At some point widespread desalination is probably inevitable, but that requires a lot of energy. Or the public could accept a reduction in their standard of living, but that’s likely not happening without a civil war.
      - atmavatar 4mo ago
        We're also not even attempting to be smart about our water usage, particularly when it comes to agriculture. Growing crops in a desert that require significant amounts of water to grow is already pretty bad, then exporting the bulk of those crops overseas adds insult to injury. Of course, all that is made possible by our pants-on-head stupid water rights laws.
      - 4mo ago
CircuitSeuss 4mo ago
Tangential: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/nuclear-regulatory-commission-plans-really-minor-changes-to-safety-regs/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/nuclear-regulatory-c...
- lelandfe 4mo ago
  Also: https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-rules-rewritten-trump https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-...
random__duck 4mo ago
Now this is a future 100 billion dollar industry!
calvinmorrison 4mo ago
nuclear clean up is a joke. The emissions from chinas coal burning plants is 10000000000000000000000000000000000000 times worse than chucking nuclear waste in the desert at random
- pinkmuffinere 4mo ago
  > The emissions from chinas coal burning plants is 10000000000000000000000000000000000000 times worse than chucking nuclear waste in the desert at random I don't think you're wrong per-se, but I think your claim could be simplified to "the impact of the common alternatives are 1000000000000000 times worse than nuclear waste"
- blitzar 4mo ago
  Not like America’s Beautiful Clean Coal.
Animats 4mo ago
This isn't about radioactivity at all. It's about the millions of pounds of mercury used at the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge,[1] resulting in a lot of low-level mercury contamination. [1] https://ehss.energy.gov/ohre/new/findingaids/epidemiologic/oakridge2/intro.html https://ehss.energy.gov/ohre/new/findingaids/epidemiologic/o...
- jhoydich 4mo ago
  It's highly likely that the waste is mixed waste, meaning rad + mercury. Much tougher to treat than just rad or mercury.
- Balgair 4mo ago
  Wait the giant deadly ball of mercury that is highly radioactive for neutron studies? Or is this another mercury thing there?
  - Animats 4mo ago
    Mercury used in some kind of electrolysis process for extracting lithium from something, apparently. Has to do with tritium production.
- crote 4mo ago
  I am quite confused about the mercury contamination being mentioned, to be honest. There's a huge amount of mercury contamination at Y-12. The DoE wants to clean it up. The DoE asks for proposals for building an on-site plant capable of cleaning it up. And that's somehow... bad? What's supposed to be the alternative here: shipping thousands of tonnes of contaminated dirt to an offsite processing plant? Dumping it all in the nearest lake? Burying it and pretending it doesn't exist? There are dozens of examples of government agencies laser-focusing on one specific solution, but I just don't see how this case is bad enough that it warrants being explicitly mentioned as an example of the DoE not allowing for enough alternatives.
ck2 4mo ago
sorry there is absolutely no federal agency that has not been compromised at this point you'd have to prove to me that Russell Vought has not tampered with an agency for any statement emerging to be believed even jobs numbers are not believed by wallstreet anymore and surpreme court has now said only Fed is off limits to protect their own money redo this report in 2029
- mrngld 4mo ago
  If you've believed all the government data for the last 10 or 15 years I got a bridge for sale. It's one of those things like, yes, it's WAY more difficult than I think most people realize to arrive at numbers (be it employment, price indexes, etc), but it's also something that demonstrably can be done. It's like "space is hard", yes, but rocket companies still rightfully get flak if they can't perform. Also, for what it's worth, it's a global phenomenon. China's numbers have always been almost wholly manufactured, but to be fair to them that was intentional. Across the West there's been a slow eroding of quality that they didn't intend necessarily, but has just been the effect of focusing on anything beyond pure merit in hiring and accuracy in measurement. Focus softened at exactly the time COVID made things more difficult, and the focus has only got worse. Ex: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/06/30/treasury-ditched-numeracy-test-to-increase-diversity-hires/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/06/30/treasury-dit... Yeah that's going to work out great. That said, I think GAO and CBO both do decent jobs at extremely thankless tasks. They both produce research and recommendations that are typically sound but get ignored by Congress 99.99% of the time.
  - jasonlotito 4mo ago
    > If you've believed all the government data for the last 10 or 15 years I got a bridge for sale. It's not about belief. It's about trust. And as they say: trust, but verify. We could trust the data, but we should, of course, verify it. And that's generally how it worked. And both sides of the aisle happily trusted this data and verified it. It wasn't always correct, but not so much that you should start by not trusting it at all. But now we are at that point. I've taken the attitude of simply assuming the opposite and starting from that position, and it has served me well most of the time. I take what the current administration is claiming, assume the opposite and start from there. To be fair, I agree with your sentiment, don't just believe what the government is saying. But there has been a dramatic shift since January 2024.

277 points by Jimmc414 4mo ago

deleted 4mo ago

[deleted]

Ouch. Two billion dollars. That could have been put into much better use, imagine being able to fund the Iran war for one more day.

falcor84 4mo ago
Why not both?
- anonym29 4mo ago
  I can think of about 39 trillion reasons... https://www.usdebtclock.org/ https://www.usdebtclock.org/
  - deleted 4mo ago
    [deleted]
  - LoganDark 4mo ago
    How do I get rid of the weird popup that wants me to download a pdf? Edit: there's a button in the top-right that says "Secret Window"
arjie 4mo ago
It's funny how this kind of pricing works. A bag of weed captured is estimated at a thousand dollars. Ten movies pirated at twice that. We fire a JASSM in combat and it costs a lot of money. We fire it in training and it costs nothing. There is no financial impact estimated to require all elevators be big enough to turn a full length gurney around. A wealth tax will yield revenue for the next thirty years at 30 times what it will yield this year. $6.6 billion will end world hunger but $100 billion is better spent on a train between Bakersfield and Fresno. I bought my car for $32k. To replace it would be $50k. I crash it, am I out $32k or $50k? Or some other number? Numerically, it could be anything.
- AnthonyMouse 4mo ago
  > A wealth tax will yield revenue for the next thirty years at 30 times what it will yield this year. Isn't this the opposite of how a wealth tax works? The annual turnover for e.g. Apple stock is ~0.4%, so a 0.8%/year wealth tax would triple the number of sellers without adding any new buyers. The negative effect on the price is outsized because most people hold long-term rather than buying or selling in any given year, but now people have to liquidate some every year in order to pay the government because you're taxing unrealized gains. And then because "wealth" is calculated as share price times number of shares, when the share price goes down, everyone's "wealth" goes down and with it next year's revenue from a wealth tax. There would be some limits on that in terms of the compounding negative effect on the share price because (among other things) if the price went down then foreign investors would find it more attractive to buy in and then they're not subject to the tax and don't have to sell every year to pay it, but causing more of the market to be owned by foreign rather than domestic taxpayers over time is also not a thing which leads to stable domestic tax revenue. > $6.6 billion will end world hunger but $100 billion is better spent on a train between Bakersfield and Fresno. The current UN estimate is more like $100 billion a year to end world hunger, whereas the initial build of a rail line is a one-time cost.
  - jquery 4mo ago
    The purpose of wealth taxes is redistributive, not revenue maximization of a spherical cow.
    - datsci_est_2015 4mo ago
      I prefer the phrasing “more liquid and efficient allocation of capital” over “wealth redistribution”.
    - AnthonyMouse 4mo ago
      What does that have to do with the revenue claim being questionable? Also, if that was the goal, wouldn't it be better to tax (or break up) the corporations rather than the shareholders? It comes out of their pocket either way, but forcing asset sales has a lot of negative consequences and bad incentives. On top of that, it handles the problem that the CEO of a huge company has too much power regardless of what percentage of the company's stock they own, by reducing the size of the company rather than their ownership stake in it.

dakolli 4mo ago

A bunch of these nuclear power startups have started reached criticality over the last week. Aalo and Valar (thiel) and now GAO is trying to loosen regulations around nuclear waste disposal.. Makes sense. Weird how we only get green energy when it's necessary for the technocratic class to power their data centers (and when they are small enough to be flown on location for the military, so the military can destroy a nations power production capabilities and still be able to power their invasions). During Valar's announcement this week regarding achieving their goals of nuclear power generation they did a tech-style keynote address where they powered a nvidia blackwell GPU and "hosted a website with it" (lol).

lclarkmichalek 4mo ago
Isn’t it a fairly natural (and useful) capitalist outcome that as prices rise incentives to increase supply increase? What’s technocratic about responding to a demand change?
- dakolli 4mo ago
  because they have infiltrated the government to reduce the cost of safety, and increase the possibility of environmental harm to pad their margins... faster shit code, AI cat videos and so they can add 100ft to the length of their next boat?
  - fc417fc802 4mo ago
    > infiltrated the government That's an awfully emotionally charged way to phrase "lobbied in the same way that everyone else does". When a matter of geopolitical interest that's consuming a significant fraction of the national economy is being impeded by the current regulations it seems entirely expected that the government would start making changes. If anything refusing to make changes under those circumstances would be truly bizarre. Sure at present they also have a substantially more sympathetic admin than usual but that's the current climate that everyone is working in.
    - 4mo ago

jjk166 4mo ago

This is an excellent example of how to communicate investigation findings. The summary is clear and succinct, there are illustrative examples readily understood by a layman, the recommendations are actionable and unambiguous, and the potential impact is quantified without promising some stupidly precise estimate. I've got some customers whose quality auditors could learn a lot from this.

chris_va 4mo ago
To play devil's advocate, the counter argument is that it's always easy to advocate for more process, and cherry pick examples to support that conclusion. The actual report basically says that the DOE already requires that they "should identify a need without having a particular solution already in mind", so it is really just an argument that people should follow the written guidelines, and add more process to make sure it happens. The examples in the report are pretty nuanced.
- bruckie 4mo ago
  That's about what I would expect from an organization named Government Accountability Office: hold the government accountable to its written guidelines (or at least report on how well it's doing at meeting them).
  - chris_va 4mo ago
    Yeah. I don't think the conclusion is necessarily wrong or that they shouldn't have investigated, but I also think the cost to the taxpayers might increase due to the underlying nuance. The report implies that the guidelines are correct, but doesn't really quantify the counterfactual. Again, devil's advocate
    - jjk166 4mo ago
      It is not the Auditor's job to determine that the rules are optimal, it is only to determine whether they are being followed. Presumably when the rule was instated someone had good reason to believe it would be beneficial; and if someone makes a compelling argument that following the rule is not beneficial, it should be repealed, not ignored.

freestanding 4mo ago

[flagged]

freestanding 4mo ago
[flagged]

Joel_Mckay 4mo ago

Sure, but has anyone ever built a container that lasts 30k years, and remains watertight? Thus far, most off-site containment storage sites over 10 years old have failed to stop containment leaks, Radon gas diffusion, or hot-material fires. Fission reactors are a 1950's loss-leader technology, and only make sense for already uninhabitable areas like space. =3

margalabargala 4mo ago
There are plenty of dry areas like in the American Southwest which can be projected to not have meaningful water attempt ingress in that time frame. Also, fission reactors make phenomenal sense on aircraft carriers, submarines, etc.
- bobmcnamara 4mo ago
  We've already leached too much uranium into the groundwater for many to drink just from the mining alone.
  - iamnothere 4mo ago
    We’ve also already depleted many aquifers past the point of recovery. We have too many people to hydrate, too many crops to water in order to feed them, and not enough water. At some point widespread desalination is probably inevitable, but that requires a lot of energy. Or the public could accept a reduction in their standard of living, but that’s likely not happening without a civil war.
    - atmavatar 4mo ago
      We're also not even attempting to be smart about our water usage, particularly when it comes to agriculture. Growing crops in a desert that require significant amounts of water to grow is already pretty bad, then exporting the bulk of those crops overseas adds insult to injury. Of course, all that is made possible by our pants-on-head stupid water rights laws.
    - 4mo ago

CircuitSeuss 4mo ago

Tangential: https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/nuclear-regulatory-commission-plans-really-minor-changes-to-safety-regs/ https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/nuclear-regulatory-c...

lelandfe 4mo ago
Also: https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-rules-rewritten-trump https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-...

random__duck 4mo ago

Now this is a future 100 billion dollar industry!

calvinmorrison 4mo ago

nuclear clean up is a joke. The emissions from chinas coal burning plants is 10000000000000000000000000000000000000 times worse than chucking nuclear waste in the desert at random

pinkmuffinere 4mo ago
> The emissions from chinas coal burning plants is 10000000000000000000000000000000000000 times worse than chucking nuclear waste in the desert at random I don't think you're wrong per-se, but I think your claim could be simplified to "the impact of the common alternatives are 1000000000000000 times worse than nuclear waste"
blitzar 4mo ago
Not like America’s Beautiful Clean Coal.

Animats 4mo ago

This isn't about radioactivity at all. It's about the millions of pounds of mercury used at the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge,[1] resulting in a lot of low-level mercury contamination. [1] https://ehss.energy.gov/ohre/new/findingaids/epidemiologic/oakridge2/intro.html https://ehss.energy.gov/ohre/new/findingaids/epidemiologic/o...

jhoydich 4mo ago
It's highly likely that the waste is mixed waste, meaning rad + mercury. Much tougher to treat than just rad or mercury.
Balgair 4mo ago
Wait the giant deadly ball of mercury that is highly radioactive for neutron studies? Or is this another mercury thing there?
- Animats 4mo ago
  Mercury used in some kind of electrolysis process for extracting lithium from something, apparently. Has to do with tritium production.
crote 4mo ago
I am quite confused about the mercury contamination being mentioned, to be honest. There's a huge amount of mercury contamination at Y-12. The DoE wants to clean it up. The DoE asks for proposals for building an on-site plant capable of cleaning it up. And that's somehow... bad? What's supposed to be the alternative here: shipping thousands of tonnes of contaminated dirt to an offsite processing plant? Dumping it all in the nearest lake? Burying it and pretending it doesn't exist? There are dozens of examples of government agencies laser-focusing on one specific solution, but I just don't see how this case is bad enough that it warrants being explicitly mentioned as an example of the DoE not allowing for enough alternatives.

ck2 4mo ago

sorry there is absolutely no federal agency that has not been compromised at this point you'd have to prove to me that Russell Vought has not tampered with an agency for any statement emerging to be believed even jobs numbers are not believed by wallstreet anymore and surpreme court has now said only Fed is off limits to protect their own money redo this report in 2029

mrngld 4mo ago
If you've believed all the government data for the last 10 or 15 years I got a bridge for sale. It's one of those things like, yes, it's WAY more difficult than I think most people realize to arrive at numbers (be it employment, price indexes, etc), but it's also something that demonstrably can be done. It's like "space is hard", yes, but rocket companies still rightfully get flak if they can't perform. Also, for what it's worth, it's a global phenomenon. China's numbers have always been almost wholly manufactured, but to be fair to them that was intentional. Across the West there's been a slow eroding of quality that they didn't intend necessarily, but has just been the effect of focusing on anything beyond pure merit in hiring and accuracy in measurement. Focus softened at exactly the time COVID made things more difficult, and the focus has only got worse. Ex: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/06/30/treasury-ditched-numeracy-test-to-increase-diversity-hires/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/06/30/treasury-dit... Yeah that's going to work out great. That said, I think GAO and CBO both do decent jobs at extremely thankless tasks. They both produce research and recommendations that are typically sound but get ignored by Congress 99.99% of the time.
- jasonlotito 4mo ago
  > If you've believed all the government data for the last 10 or 15 years I got a bridge for sale. It's not about belief. It's about trust. And as they say: trust, but verify. We could trust the data, but we should, of course, verify it. And that's generally how it worked. And both sides of the aisle happily trusted this data and verified it. It wasn't always correct, but not so much that you should start by not trusting it at all. But now we are at that point. I've taken the attitude of simply assuming the opposite and starting from that position, and it has served me well most of the time. I take what the current administration is claiming, assume the opposite and start from there. To be fair, I agree with your sentiment, don't just believe what the government is saying. But there has been a dramatic shift since January 2024.