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.
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.
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).
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.
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.
My understanding is that the only places that are starving is places like Gaza and South Sudan which are poor and actively under attack. Do you have a source for how we can spend <$10b and solve world hunger?
> 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.
if you were to send me an article containing a new one of these each day, with citations, i would pay you $1 per day.
but if you were to send me an article containing a new one of these each day, with citations, plus a bunch of econ theory rationalizing it, i would pay you $0.
And then you ask how, and you just get hand waving. Elon Musk offered the money if somebody would provide a coherent plan of how to solve world hunger with it. Nobody could.
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-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.
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
Every miner knows most holes fill with water sooner or later.
Corollary: Every sailor knows most vessels are sunk sooner or later.
Aircraft carriers and Submarines are not civilian infrastructure, and if they sink offshore where no can live... will usually pose less of a problem like buoyant waste barrels popping up later.
We are in the age of bargain conflicts, where throwing gold bricks at adversaries makes less sense strategically. =3
> Sure, but has anyone ever built a container that lasts 30k years, and remains watertight?
Why are people still proposing this antiquated 20th century storage technology instead of just building the newer reactor types that not only don't have this problem but are the best way to get rid of the long-lived isotopes we already have from 20th century reactor designs?
The answer to what you do with isotopes with long half lives is that you put them in a reactor that turns them into isotopes with shorter half lives.
I think storing nuclear waste was decided to be a bad idea a long time ago.
I'm not a nuclear scientist, but I was under the impression that if something is radioactive enough to be a hazard then it's radioactive enough to generate power.
A brand new Uranium fuel pellet is often safe to hold with gloved hands for a moment.
Spent fuel with complex decay isotopes must be kept under deep cooling pools with criticality control precautions. From a chemistry perspective, complex isotope products like Plutonium are more obscure to evolutionary biology, so it is often much more dangerous even in accidental trace exposures.
I am just a sentient turnip that prefers distributed Solar products. Have a great day =3
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).
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.
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.
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.
> GAO is a Congressional agency, it does not fall under the Executive
I don't know that it's accurate to say such things any more, due to the unitary executive decree by the supreme council. The GAO is intrinsically motivated by law - both to carry out its purpose, and simply to pay its employees - and the supreme council has decreed that all execution of the law is subject to the whims of the president. If the president woke up from his afternoon nap and told GAO employees they weren't going to get paid unless they did a certain thing, it's certainly possible that the supreme council might walk back their earlier decree (although good luck with the payment infrastructure already being pwnt and all that). But it's also possible they might not, given how they've already approved other autocratic dynamics.
> GAO is a Congressional agency, it does not fall under the Executive
Ah ah ah, you're describing how things were before Trump v. Slaughter, when the Supreme Court justices ruled that Republican Presidents are allowed to fire the heads of non-executive agencies so long as they are not the Federal Reserve.
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?
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?
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.
> 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.
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.
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
> 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"
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.
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.
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).
[flagged]
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/o...
It's highly likely that the waste is mixed waste, meaning rad + mercury. Much tougher to treat than just rad or mercury.
Tangential:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/nuclear-regulatory-c...
Also:
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-...
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.
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.
> $6.6 billion will end world hunger
My understanding is that the only places that are starving is places like Gaza and South Sudan which are poor and actively under attack. Do you have a source for how we can spend <$10b and solve world hunger?
1 reply →
> 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.
13 replies →
good list.
if you were to send me an article containing a new one of these each day, with citations, i would pay you $1 per day.
but if you were to send me an article containing a new one of these each day, with citations, plus a bunch of econ theory rationalizing it, i would pay you $0.
1 reply →
> $6.6 billion will end world hunger
And then you ask how, and you just get hand waving. Elon Musk offered the money if somebody would provide a coherent plan of how to solve world hunger with it. Nobody could.
Why not both?
I can think of about 39 trillion reasons... https://www.usdebtclock.org/
2 replies →
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
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-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.
Now this is a future 100 billion dollar industry!
saving is always great!
[flagged]
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
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.
We've already leached too much uranium into the groundwater for many to drink just from the mining alone.
18 replies →
Every miner knows most holes fill with water sooner or later.
Corollary: Every sailor knows most vessels are sunk sooner or later.
Aircraft carriers and Submarines are not civilian infrastructure, and if they sink offshore where no can live... will usually pose less of a problem like buoyant waste barrels popping up later.
We are in the age of bargain conflicts, where throwing gold bricks at adversaries makes less sense strategically. =3
1 reply →
> Sure, but has anyone ever built a container that lasts 30k years, and remains watertight?
Why are people still proposing this antiquated 20th century storage technology instead of just building the newer reactor types that not only don't have this problem but are the best way to get rid of the long-lived isotopes we already have from 20th century reactor designs?
The answer to what you do with isotopes with long half lives is that you put them in a reactor that turns them into isotopes with shorter half lives.
Mostly, it is the same naive lies we have all heard dozens of times before in the past.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HUHuX-Gbenc
Also, the billions of dollars boondoggle reactor projects that never delivered is a hard sell. "Trust me bro" isn't enough anymore. lol =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6Kkgg494Ifc
7 replies →
> most off-site containment storage sites over 10 years old have failed to stop containment leaks
There's nothing obvious I could find that I could find that would confirm it. Could you cite something?
99.99% of the radiation is gone after 300 years, so you don't really have to.
"Plutonium-239 has a half-life of 24110 years"
There are dozens of other decay products with various hazardous properties.
Scientific hubris can't be made safe, and societies have proven irresponsible with fuel life-cycle management. =3
2 replies →
I think storing nuclear waste was decided to be a bad idea a long time ago.
I'm not a nuclear scientist, but I was under the impression that if something is radioactive enough to be a hazard then it's radioactive enough to generate power.
Is that not the case?
A brand new Uranium fuel pellet is often safe to hold with gloved hands for a moment.
Spent fuel with complex decay isotopes must be kept under deep cooling pools with criticality control precautions. From a chemistry perspective, complex isotope products like Plutonium are more obscure to evolutionary biology, so it is often much more dangerous even in accidental trace exposures.
I am just a sentient turnip that prefers distributed Solar products. Have a great day =3
[flagged]
The living, and sometimes those dying from lung cancer. =3
edit: Please don't down peoples karma for being crass. If it was a honest question they deserve an honest answer.
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).
> 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.
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-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".
A sane and well put together comment. Thank you. This should be the standard for discussion here.
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.
> GAO is a Congressional agency, it does not fall under the Executive
I don't know that it's accurate to say such things any more, due to the unitary executive decree by the supreme council. The GAO is intrinsically motivated by law - both to carry out its purpose, and simply to pay its employees - and the supreme council has decreed that all execution of the law is subject to the whims of the president. If the president woke up from his afternoon nap and told GAO employees they weren't going to get paid unless they did a certain thing, it's certainly possible that the supreme council might walk back their earlier decree (although good luck with the payment infrastructure already being pwnt and all that). But it's also possible they might not, given how they've already approved other autocratic dynamics.
9 replies →
> GAO is a Congressional agency, it does not fall under the Executive
Ah ah ah, you're describing how things were before Trump v. Slaughter, when the Supreme Court justices ruled that Republican Presidents are allowed to fire the heads of non-executive agencies so long as they are not the Federal Reserve.
3 replies →
Is it really that weird? The regulatory morass suddenly starts opening up when enough money is involved. Seems almost like a universal truth.
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?
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?
8 replies →
Can Tolkien's estate please do something?
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.
> 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.
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.
What are the fuel constraints the French have that we don't?
Is it geographic (we have a lot more unused/undesirable than France, for example), regulatory, etc?
1 reply →
Why can't you? All other forms of power generation do that.
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
Not like America’s Beautiful Clean Coal.
> 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"