4 ms·

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

by dakolli 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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.
    - jauntywundrkind 3mo ago
      The presumption of regularity here is a joke. This administration has grifted swindled no-bid awarded and bought out anything they please with reckless abandon, Vought is actively Project 2025 shutting done any and everything not run by the most fanatical political operatives. It's impossible to pretend like any agencies are functioning in any way as normal, are using objective scientific expert based assessments to govern.
      - gwerbin 3mo ago
        To be fair this was all happening before, just 10x less. And the current minority party was often willing to ignore it when it was their people doing it. So yes it's bad on a generational scale and we might never recover from it, but we also have to admit that we are reaping the fruit of a bipartisan-sown seed.
        jauntywundrkind 3mo ago
        The previous party left opposition party people in power many times. Which, like, is how the US has worked for a century and a half. It was not a spoils system, in 98% of cases. This is pure spoils. In a way America has never remotely seen ever before. Utter rankest most foul spoils, nothing but pure politics, with essentially no moderators.
        parineum 3mo ago
        The point is that this method of grift isn't new or partisan. The magnitude is what is new. Government contracts have been awarded to people with connections since forever. It's absolutely nothing new. There's just no fog leaf now, Trump skips the part where he's pretending it was a fair bidding process.
        jauntywundrkind 3mo ago
        How many orders of magnitude do you need to recognize a distinction? I think it's just silly ridiculous nonsense to say this is "just" orders of magnitude difference. At what point do we accept or not accept what feels like the most irrelevant smokescreen cover excuse? Maybe there is a 0.0001% resemblance to the past? But trying to chase whether it's 4, 6, or 11 orders of magnitude (based on the billions thrown around I think it's actually more orders of magnitude by a lot) is obfuscating that this is a colossal step change that looks nothing remotely in any way like the past and that we had rules and some checks and balances through bipartisan non-president controlled institutions in the past, through administrator appointments that were somewhat bipartisan. The bad hasn't even really hit yet. The Supreme Court just made this so much worse, with a president able to fire administrators, to the degree where they lack required concensus the operate at all, but where it's not possible for a congress without dual majority to get people in to office. You need both the president and all Congress to govern, but anyone can de-govern & tear down institutions freely. A Republican Project 2025 wet dream, to destroy the state & never let it regenerate at all. What scum. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/07/supreme-court-donald-trump-successor-sabotage.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/07/supreme-court-do...
  - cucumber3732842 3mo ago
    Who do you think was making money when all those safety and environmental compliance solutions got all but written into law? If you think the ruling class isn't making money coming and going I've got a bridge to sell you.
fc417fc802 3mo ago
Is it really that weird? The regulatory morass suddenly starts opening up when enough money is involved. Seems almost like a universal truth.
Jtsummers 3mo ago
> now "doge" (GAO) GAO is not DOGE. For those who don't know the difference between the two, confusing them is about like confusing the President with the Senate. GAO is a Congressional agency, it does not fall under the Executive. Its purpose is in its name, and it does a pretty good job of it. It also cannot, on its own (unlike how DOGE was empowered) effect any change. They can only conduct studies and make recommendations, it's up to Congress and the relevant Executive branch agencies to address the recommendations or not. > (GAO) is trying to loosen regulations around nuclear waste disposal. This is not about loosening regulations, it's about DOE Office of Environmental Management not following its own guidance when documenting mission needs (which happen before Analysis of Alternatives (AOA). The problem GAO is identifying here is relatively minor (compared to other problems their other studies have found), but potentially costly, in that they have identified numerous instances of proposing a particular solution too early, which can constrain what's considered later on during the AOA effort.
- deleted 3mo ago
  [deleted]
- payphonefiend 3mo ago
  A sane and well put together comment. Thank you. This should be the standard for discussion here.
- Terr_ 3mo ago
  I suspect parent-poster simply intended to write OMB [0] instead. Perhaps because both initialisms [1] refer to government groups that sometimes publish important reports about budgets. [0] https://prospect.org/2026/02/05/doge-russell-vought-elon-musk-office-management-budget/ https://prospect.org/2026/02/05/doge-russell-vought-elon-mus... [1] Pedantically: Not acronyms, which are spoken like a full word. Ex: FIFA is usually an acronym "feefah", not an initialism "Eff-Eye-Eff-Aye".
- dakolli 3mo ago
  I mixed up some names. The timing doesn't seem coincidental. We are at the end of Executive Order 14301, signed May 2025, which called for at least three test reactors to reach criticality by July 4, 2026. So immediately after Trumps nuclear power project ends (of which his son's and all his friends are invested in these neo-nuclear power companies), and a bunch of companies reach criticality this week, the government starts issuing orders to make things easier for them to be profitable. Your naive to think it's anything else other than corruption.
Pxtl 3mo ago
Can Tolkien's estate please do something?
- Terr_ 3mo ago
  In seriousness, probably not, unless US "intellectual property" law gets worse somehow. Short phrases fall under trademarks rather than copyrights, and even then it needs to be something that would cause commercial confusion, and very few people are going to buy a Tolkien book expecting a nuclear reactor or vice-versa.
  - Pxtl 3mo ago
    I thought that was mostly about coincidentally similar names. Does it change when one is explicitly a reference to the copyrighted work? It's not like Thiel just thinks that Valar and Palantir and Anduril etc are all just nice sounding words, he's built a brand out of companies named after Tolkien's stuff.
    - darth_aardvark 3mo ago
      I happen to know for a fact that Palantir licenses the name from the estate at an exorbitant yearly fee.
      - Terr_ 3mo ago
        IANAL but I would assume that such an agreement (A) falls under trademark law and (B) is being done to avoid a costly/embarrassing fight, even if it's a fight Thiel might win.
zer00eyz 3mo ago
> is trying to loosen regulations around nuclear waste disposal And here lies the problem that ever one wants to burry their head in the sand about. Can one, in theory, make safe nuclear reactors. You bet you can. The thing is that you cant leave a bunch of "we will deal with that later" problems laying around. In the case of the US thats spent fuel rods. Should one worry about these, no, but you also don't want them as the slats on your kids mattress frame. They are fine where they are. The French, because of fuel constraints, built fuel reprocessing into their nuclear "system" (and it is that, a whole system). We just leave spent fuel sitting around as a "later problem", because for us, its just much cheaper to mine and refine more uranium than it is to clean up the "spent" fuel we have. The moment that you need to build in reprocessing (and solve that pesky later problem) the economics of nuclear stop making sense.
- fc417fc802 3mo ago
  Whether or not waste is reprocessed there will be high level waste that needs to be disposed of. It's merely a matter of volume produced per unit of energy. Either approach is entirely reasonable. The inability of the US to formally approve a permanent disposal site is purely political. Still, at this point enough other countries have managed to do so that we might eventually be able to pay to export our waste to one of them instead of solving our own dysfunction.
  - chickenbig 3mo ago
    > there will be high level waste that needs to be disposed of Fortunately it is self disposing, decaying away. Unlikely plain old mercury or arsenic.
    - zer00eyz 3mo ago
      The "high level waste" is the stuff that takes 10k years to decay. The big things that you get out of reprocessing nuclear fuel (other than usable uranium) are plutonium, Strontium, cesium ... the rest of the material left over (4%) gets embedded in glass and dumped in a deep pit and forgotten about. The things we might use (plutonium, strontium) have some rather "questionable" applications: https://thedefensepost.com/2026/07/08/darpa-nuclear-waste-drone-battery/ https://thedefensepost.com/2026/07/08/darpa-nuclear-waste-dr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India–United_States_espionage_on_Nanda_Devi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India–United_States_espionage_...

by dakolli 3mo ago

lclarkmichalek 3mo 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 3mo 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 3mo 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.
  - jauntywundrkind 3mo ago
    The presumption of regularity here is a joke. This administration has grifted swindled no-bid awarded and bought out anything they please with reckless abandon, Vought is actively Project 2025 shutting done any and everything not run by the most fanatical political operatives. It's impossible to pretend like any agencies are functioning in any way as normal, are using objective scientific expert based assessments to govern.
    - gwerbin 3mo ago
      To be fair this was all happening before, just 10x less. And the current minority party was often willing to ignore it when it was their people doing it. So yes it's bad on a generational scale and we might never recover from it, but we also have to admit that we are reaping the fruit of a bipartisan-sown seed.
      - jauntywundrkind 3mo ago
        The previous party left opposition party people in power many times. Which, like, is how the US has worked for a century and a half. It was not a spoils system, in 98% of cases. This is pure spoils. In a way America has never remotely seen ever before. Utter rankest most foul spoils, nothing but pure politics, with essentially no moderators.
        parineum 3mo ago
        The point is that this method of grift isn't new or partisan. The magnitude is what is new. Government contracts have been awarded to people with connections since forever. It's absolutely nothing new. There's just no fog leaf now, Trump skips the part where he's pretending it was a fair bidding process.
        jauntywundrkind 3mo ago
        How many orders of magnitude do you need to recognize a distinction? I think it's just silly ridiculous nonsense to say this is "just" orders of magnitude difference. At what point do we accept or not accept what feels like the most irrelevant smokescreen cover excuse? Maybe there is a 0.0001% resemblance to the past? But trying to chase whether it's 4, 6, or 11 orders of magnitude (based on the billions thrown around I think it's actually more orders of magnitude by a lot) is obfuscating that this is a colossal step change that looks nothing remotely in any way like the past and that we had rules and some checks and balances through bipartisan non-president controlled institutions in the past, through administrator appointments that were somewhat bipartisan. The bad hasn't even really hit yet. The Supreme Court just made this so much worse, with a president able to fire administrators, to the degree where they lack required concensus the operate at all, but where it's not possible for a congress without dual majority to get people in to office. You need both the president and all Congress to govern, but anyone can de-govern & tear down institutions freely. A Republican Project 2025 wet dream, to destroy the state & never let it regenerate at all. What scum. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/07/supreme-court-donald-trump-successor-sabotage.html https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2026/07/supreme-court-do...
- cucumber3732842 3mo ago
  Who do you think was making money when all those safety and environmental compliance solutions got all but written into law? If you think the ruling class isn't making money coming and going I've got a bridge to sell you.

fc417fc802 3mo ago

Is it really that weird? The regulatory morass suddenly starts opening up when enough money is involved. Seems almost like a universal truth.

Jtsummers 3mo ago

> now "doge" (GAO) GAO is not DOGE. For those who don't know the difference between the two, confusing them is about like confusing the President with the Senate. GAO is a Congressional agency, it does not fall under the Executive. Its purpose is in its name, and it does a pretty good job of it. It also cannot, on its own (unlike how DOGE was empowered) effect any change. They can only conduct studies and make recommendations, it's up to Congress and the relevant Executive branch agencies to address the recommendations or not. > (GAO) is trying to loosen regulations around nuclear waste disposal. This is not about loosening regulations, it's about DOE Office of Environmental Management not following its own guidance when documenting mission needs (which happen before Analysis of Alternatives (AOA). The problem GAO is identifying here is relatively minor (compared to other problems their other studies have found), but potentially costly, in that they have identified numerous instances of proposing a particular solution too early, which can constrain what's considered later on during the AOA effort.

deleted 3mo ago
[deleted]
payphonefiend 3mo ago
A sane and well put together comment. Thank you. This should be the standard for discussion here.
Terr_ 3mo ago
I suspect parent-poster simply intended to write OMB [0] instead. Perhaps because both initialisms [1] refer to government groups that sometimes publish important reports about budgets. [0] https://prospect.org/2026/02/05/doge-russell-vought-elon-musk-office-management-budget/ https://prospect.org/2026/02/05/doge-russell-vought-elon-mus... [1] Pedantically: Not acronyms, which are spoken like a full word. Ex: FIFA is usually an acronym "feefah", not an initialism "Eff-Eye-Eff-Aye".
dakolli 3mo ago
I mixed up some names. The timing doesn't seem coincidental. We are at the end of Executive Order 14301, signed May 2025, which called for at least three test reactors to reach criticality by July 4, 2026. So immediately after Trumps nuclear power project ends (of which his son's and all his friends are invested in these neo-nuclear power companies), and a bunch of companies reach criticality this week, the government starts issuing orders to make things easier for them to be profitable. Your naive to think it's anything else other than corruption.

Pxtl 3mo ago

Can Tolkien's estate please do something?

Terr_ 3mo ago
In seriousness, probably not, unless US "intellectual property" law gets worse somehow. Short phrases fall under trademarks rather than copyrights, and even then it needs to be something that would cause commercial confusion, and very few people are going to buy a Tolkien book expecting a nuclear reactor or vice-versa.
- Pxtl 3mo ago
  I thought that was mostly about coincidentally similar names. Does it change when one is explicitly a reference to the copyrighted work? It's not like Thiel just thinks that Valar and Palantir and Anduril etc are all just nice sounding words, he's built a brand out of companies named after Tolkien's stuff.
  - darth_aardvark 3mo ago
    I happen to know for a fact that Palantir licenses the name from the estate at an exorbitant yearly fee.
    - Terr_ 3mo ago
      IANAL but I would assume that such an agreement (A) falls under trademark law and (B) is being done to avoid a costly/embarrassing fight, even if it's a fight Thiel might win.

zer00eyz 3mo ago

> is trying to loosen regulations around nuclear waste disposal And here lies the problem that ever one wants to burry their head in the sand about. Can one, in theory, make safe nuclear reactors. You bet you can. The thing is that you cant leave a bunch of "we will deal with that later" problems laying around. In the case of the US thats spent fuel rods. Should one worry about these, no, but you also don't want them as the slats on your kids mattress frame. They are fine where they are. The French, because of fuel constraints, built fuel reprocessing into their nuclear "system" (and it is that, a whole system). We just leave spent fuel sitting around as a "later problem", because for us, its just much cheaper to mine and refine more uranium than it is to clean up the "spent" fuel we have. The moment that you need to build in reprocessing (and solve that pesky later problem) the economics of nuclear stop making sense.

fc417fc802 3mo ago
Whether or not waste is reprocessed there will be high level waste that needs to be disposed of. It's merely a matter of volume produced per unit of energy. Either approach is entirely reasonable. The inability of the US to formally approve a permanent disposal site is purely political. Still, at this point enough other countries have managed to do so that we might eventually be able to pay to export our waste to one of them instead of solving our own dysfunction.
- chickenbig 3mo ago
  > there will be high level waste that needs to be disposed of Fortunately it is self disposing, decaying away. Unlikely plain old mercury or arsenic.
  - zer00eyz 3mo ago
    The "high level waste" is the stuff that takes 10k years to decay. The big things that you get out of reprocessing nuclear fuel (other than usable uranium) are plutonium, Strontium, cesium ... the rest of the material left over (4%) gets embedded in glass and dumped in a deep pit and forgotten about. The things we might use (plutonium, strontium) have some rather "questionable" applications: https://thedefensepost.com/2026/07/08/darpa-nuclear-waste-drone-battery/ https://thedefensepost.com/2026/07/08/darpa-nuclear-waste-dr... https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India–United_States_espionage_on_Nanda_Devi https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India–United_States_espionage_...