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.
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.
> 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.
Some people have to adjust their mortgage in order to pay property taxes. Most people pay property taxes out of their income.
What percentage of Americans, especially home-owning Americans, have more wealth in the stock market than in their home?
Property tax has the positive effect of encouraging efficient land usage and discouraging speculation and rent seeking. Is there a parallel case to be made for stock holdings, or is such an argument dead in the water because land is more tangible than company shares?
> Some people have to adjust their mortgage in order to pay property taxes. Most people pay property taxes out of their income.
Most people get their income from wages and then pay the taxes with that. The people who are the target of a wealth tax get most of their income from investments and then to get money to pay a new tax would have to sell that proportion of the investments.
It also doesn't really change anything if they invest in the sort of things that give returns through dividends instead of share price increases, because they reinvest the dividends, and having fewer people buy the stock so they can use the money to pay the tax has the same negative effect on the share price as having more people sell the stock to use the money to pay the tax.
> Property tax has the positive effect of encouraging efficient land usage and discouraging speculation and rent seeking.
Property tax to the extent that it's a tax on buildings/construction does precisely the opposite. Where land is more scarce the most efficient use is to build a high rise to maximize the amount of indoor living space per unit land, which is exactly the thing property tax taxes and thereby disincentivizes.
Asset taxes in general create major perverse incentives because it causes underinvestment in the thing being taxed and overinvestment in any alternative that can act as a tax shelter, whether because the law exempts the alternative for some reason (e.g. lobbying), or it's hard to accurately value and therefore allows for chicanery, or it's in another jurisdiction.
> Property tax to the extent that it's a tax on buildings/construction does precisely the opposite. Where land is more scarce the most efficient use is to build a high rise to maximize the amount of indoor living space per unit land, which is exactly the thing property tax taxes and thereby disincentivizes.
Property tax breaks in my locale lead to empty lots and empty buildings, which is the least efficient use of land imaginable. Property value seems to play a significant enough role in convincing land owners to sell their underutilized land if property taxes provide the activation energy to force them to sell. Otherwise they sit and speculate. So, your argument is convincing in theory, but appears to fall apart in practice. Aside, I’m a fan of Georgism in theory.
> Asset taxes in general create major perverse incentives because it causes underinvestment in the thing being taxed and overinvestment in any alternative that can act as a tax shelter, whether because the law exempts the alternative for some reason (e.g. lobbying), or it's hard to accurately value and therefore allows for chicanery, or it's in another jurisdiction.
I’m sure wealth managers are already devising strategies for reducing taxable wealth based on speculative laws and regulations. This shouldn’t be a reason not to proceed, but instead to put more resources to effective design.
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.
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.
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
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.
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.
Solar energy is abundant in the places desalination is most needed. The market will balance out once that becomes apparent to constituents. They will vote to fund solar, politics are only a temporary impediment.
> At some point widespread desalination is probably inevitable, but that requires a lot of energy.
We'll also need somewhere to put all that salt. It'd be best to stop the largest wastes of the clean water that we have. We have plenty of water for people and food. We just have to stop the wasteful practices of industry and force them to be more efficient and responsible even though it will eat into their profits.
> Or the public could accept a reduction in their standard of living, but that’s likely not happening without a civil war.
I suspect what we'll actually do is what we always do. Innovate our way into a higher standard of living while simultaneously elevating the poorest people out of poverty and finding novel ways to feed, clothe and house our population.
It's funny how persistent malthusians are in the face of evidence to the contrary.
We’ll see what that looks like in the face of demographic decline and increasingly expensive oil.
It’s possible that some kind of technological miracle rescues us, but it seems more likely to me that we follow the pattern of catabolic collapse seen in the Bronze Age, Easter Island, and Europe in the Dark Ages. Civilization may rebound, sure, but humans have a history of overextension followed by decline (as do all animals).
A very small number of people are taking (and often wasting) the majority of the worlds wealth and resources and harming everyone else in the process. We could probably stave off that decline for a lot longer if we did something about the leeches accelerating our collapse.
Wait till you find out how much uranium there is in coal ash and how many tons a year are put in the air or dumped into ground water. Both the ash and uranium tailings are in the 50ppm range, but we make 100Mt per year of one of them and basically no uranium tailings in the US. Globally, the ratio is over 1Gt of coal ash and 10-20Mt of uranium tailings.
I have a lower opinion of coal, more than any other energy source. From an economics perspective it also costs 4% more than solar now. There is no excuse to bring back 1800's steam technology.
If you grill, use charcoal because it is short-term carbon cycle neutral.
We have one of the largest global coal deposits, but it is also one of the most contaminated natural hot heavy metal sources currently known. Indeed, the natural run off has already closed many water wells for small towns in the area. =3
and we've collected enough arsenic from a single mine to kill every human on the planet 300 times over in one spot- what's your point? That because we screwed up one spot we should give up?
Not sure why people buried your post, but many water-soluble metal salts are pretty toxic to animals and people.
In areas with natural Arsenic accumulation (or Acid rain run off), farmers will sometimes place rusting iron equipment in the water ways to reduce metals accumulating in the topsoil.
With low rainfall the evaporated well-water problem can certainly be a serious concern. =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.
None of it is lies. The CANDU reactors Canada has been operating for decades can run on spent fuel from legacy reactors and China actually uses them that way. The US hasn't built any of them, or any of the other designs that can do the same thing, in significant part because people keep presenting the circular reasoning that we shouldn't build newer reactors without dealing with nuclear waste when we should be dealing with nuclear waste by building newer reactors.
Indeed, Canada was also indirectly responsible for many Nuclear weapons proliferation issues in North Korea, India, and Pakistan. Selling small research reactors to emerging economies had long-term consequences.
As a side note, the CANDU are famously bad designs known to develop heavy maintenance costs even to remain operational. Yes these can run on garbage fuel, but only because other designs could never tolerate such waste.
It is a teachable moment about legacy designs having unintended benefits as well. =3
> Indeed, Canada was also indirectly responsible for many Nuclear weapons proliferation issues in North Korea, India, and Pakistan. Selling small research reactors to emerging economies had long-term consequences.
What does that have to do with how the US can deal with spent fuel? The reactors that consume spent fuel are ordinary power generating reactors rather than small research reactors and the US already has nuclear weapons.
> As a side note, the CANDU are famously bad designs known to develop heavy maintenance costs even to remain operational
The CANDU design is from the 1960s. It's not what you would actually use for a new project, it's an empirical demonstration that reactors that run on spent fuel are a real thing that actually exist rather than merely a theoretical possibility. There are also modern designs under construction in Europe and the same company is partnering with a US company to permanently destroy some of the US government's cold war era plutonium.
>What does that have to do with how the US can deal with spent fuel?
Unlike France, the US did not use a closed-loop multi-grade fuel cycle for economic reasons.
>an empirical demonstration that reactors that run on spent fuel
It is more complex, as running on low-grade fuel is not the same as running on spent-fuel.
However, China's recent Thorium reactor facility is interesting, and it would be neat to see some real data on its output. The US shuttered their own facility a long time back, but it is unclear why the research was effectively abandoned. There probably was a legitimate reason, but who knows for sure. =3
> Unlike France, the US did not use a closed-loop multi-grade fuel cycle for economic reason
Those are the existing reactors. The premise is building new ones of a different design.
> It is more complex, as running on low-grade fuel is not the same as running on spent-fuel.
It has to be accounted for but it's not some kind of impossible sorcery.
> The US shuttered their own facility a long time back, but it is unclear why the research was effectively abandoned. There probably was a legitimate reason, but who knows for sure.
There is a lot of politics involved in energy in general and nuclear in particular.
Indeed, one persons opinion is not really all that important, but one is alive because of decisions made long before they were born.
>Because plutonium sounds scary?
Which of the 14 isotopes are you referring too? In general, synthetic isotopes unknown in our evolutionary biology are far more toxic in trace exposures.
Some people don't get a chance to learn form their mistakes. Best of luck =3
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.
They aren't part of the executive branch, period. The president has no control over their pay or performance. Hell, the president doesn't have nearly as much control over the executive branch as you imply, however much he might want it.
> They aren't part of the executive branch, period. The president has no control over their pay or performance.
They are run by the comptroller general who is appointed by the president meaning that the president has total control over who gets paid anything at all. Right now ours is just an "Acting Comptroller General" filling in until the president appoints someone else.
But Congress is very comfortable so far just letting the executive branch do whatever. Even if the orders aren't emanating from the oval office directly, there's clearly a coordinated agenda in motion. It's entirely reasonable to suspect that the GAO has been politicized in that environment.
You've just blindly asserted a whole bunch of things without laying out any sort of supporting arguments. What exactly makes the GAO not "part of the executive branch" ? My understanding is that "branches" are merely a framework used for describing government, not a prescriptive org chart. And how do the GAO's employees get paid, if not by a system that is now under the control of the autocratic Executive?
What we consider an the branches are defined in the Constitution, but my point is they are not simply defined as the top-level in a hierarchy of organizations, but rather behaviorally based on what function is being performed.
Sure, that is what is written down. But as a necessary part of its operation, there is a whole lot of executive power being exercised as well, which the unitary executive theory says would fall under the authority of the president.
> 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.
You must have missed the Chevron doctrine case where the supreme court took much of the ability for Congress to give away their power to the executive in the guise of creating agencies.
No one is claiming that the recent rulings have been consistent, just that they're making it pretty clear that they're happy to pretty much abolish any semblance of Independency for agencies (other than the Fed, which of course is a great example of how inconsistent they're willing to be in pretending that somehow there's a constitutional basis for it being a special snowflake among all of the other agencies)
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?
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-do...
I don't necessarily think you're wrong but I do think it's a non sequitur. The broader geopolitical and economic situation surrounding the advent of AI and datacenters has approximately nothing to do with the way the most recent US election went.
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.
They had access to uranium sourced cheaply from former North African colonies, but now they no longer have that access.
We have ample deposits and (for now) easy access to Canadian deposits. I imagine that there are deals in place to secure that access at an efficient price given the national security angle at play.
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.
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...
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.
> 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.
Some disjointed thoughts of mine on this topic:
Some people have to adjust their mortgage in order to pay property taxes. Most people pay property taxes out of their income.
What percentage of Americans, especially home-owning Americans, have more wealth in the stock market than in their home?
Property tax has the positive effect of encouraging efficient land usage and discouraging speculation and rent seeking. Is there a parallel case to be made for stock holdings, or is such an argument dead in the water because land is more tangible than company shares?
> Some people have to adjust their mortgage in order to pay property taxes. Most people pay property taxes out of their income.
Most people get their income from wages and then pay the taxes with that. The people who are the target of a wealth tax get most of their income from investments and then to get money to pay a new tax would have to sell that proportion of the investments.
It also doesn't really change anything if they invest in the sort of things that give returns through dividends instead of share price increases, because they reinvest the dividends, and having fewer people buy the stock so they can use the money to pay the tax has the same negative effect on the share price as having more people sell the stock to use the money to pay the tax.
> Property tax has the positive effect of encouraging efficient land usage and discouraging speculation and rent seeking.
Property tax to the extent that it's a tax on buildings/construction does precisely the opposite. Where land is more scarce the most efficient use is to build a high rise to maximize the amount of indoor living space per unit land, which is exactly the thing property tax taxes and thereby disincentivizes.
Asset taxes in general create major perverse incentives because it causes underinvestment in the thing being taxed and overinvestment in any alternative that can act as a tax shelter, whether because the law exempts the alternative for some reason (e.g. lobbying), or it's hard to accurately value and therefore allows for chicanery, or it's in another jurisdiction.
> Property tax to the extent that it's a tax on buildings/construction does precisely the opposite. Where land is more scarce the most efficient use is to build a high rise to maximize the amount of indoor living space per unit land, which is exactly the thing property tax taxes and thereby disincentivizes.
Property tax breaks in my locale lead to empty lots and empty buildings, which is the least efficient use of land imaginable. Property value seems to play a significant enough role in convincing land owners to sell their underutilized land if property taxes provide the activation energy to force them to sell. Otherwise they sit and speculate. So, your argument is convincing in theory, but appears to fall apart in practice. Aside, I’m a fan of Georgism in theory.
> Asset taxes in general create major perverse incentives because it causes underinvestment in the thing being taxed and overinvestment in any alternative that can act as a tax shelter, whether because the law exempts the alternative for some reason (e.g. lobbying), or it's hard to accurately value and therefore allows for chicanery, or it's in another jurisdiction.
I’m sure wealth managers are already devising strategies for reducing taxable wealth based on speculative laws and regulations. This shouldn’t be a reason not to proceed, but instead to put more resources to effective design.
The purpose of wealth taxes is redistributive, not revenue maximization of a spherical cow.
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.
I prefer the phrasing “more liquid and efficient allocation of capital” over “wealth redistribution”.
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.
Why not both?
I can think of about 39 trillion reasons... https://www.usdebtclock.org/
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"
Now this is a future 100 billion dollar industry!
saving is always great!
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.
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.
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.
Solar energy is abundant in the places desalination is most needed. The market will balance out once that becomes apparent to constituents. They will vote to fund solar, politics are only a temporary impediment.
> At some point widespread desalination is probably inevitable, but that requires a lot of energy.
We'll also need somewhere to put all that salt. It'd be best to stop the largest wastes of the clean water that we have. We have plenty of water for people and food. We just have to stop the wasteful practices of industry and force them to be more efficient and responsible even though it will eat into their profits.
> Or the public could accept a reduction in their standard of living, but that’s likely not happening without a civil war.
I suspect what we'll actually do is what we always do. Innovate our way into a higher standard of living while simultaneously elevating the poorest people out of poverty and finding novel ways to feed, clothe and house our population.
It's funny how persistent malthusians are in the face of evidence to the contrary.
We’ll see what that looks like in the face of demographic decline and increasingly expensive oil.
It’s possible that some kind of technological miracle rescues us, but it seems more likely to me that we follow the pattern of catabolic collapse seen in the Bronze Age, Easter Island, and Europe in the Dark Ages. Civilization may rebound, sure, but humans have a history of overextension followed by decline (as do all animals).
A very small number of people are taking (and often wasting) the majority of the worlds wealth and resources and harming everyone else in the process. We could probably stave off that decline for a lot longer if we did something about the leeches accelerating our collapse.
If pituitary driven impulse models are representative, than current trends of exploiting generations is provably unsustainable.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CXj0AGuh4c
I wouldn't worry about it, and have a wonderful day. =3
Seems more plausible given current trends. lol =3
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Soylent_Green
Wait till you find out how much uranium there is in coal ash and how many tons a year are put in the air or dumped into ground water. Both the ash and uranium tailings are in the 50ppm range, but we make 100Mt per year of one of them and basically no uranium tailings in the US. Globally, the ratio is over 1Gt of coal ash and 10-20Mt of uranium tailings.
One is currently a problem, the other isn't.
Let's also not forget how much fresh water has been ruined with fracking
"Nuclear fission: the worst energy source, except for almost all the other ones"
I have a lower opinion of coal, more than any other energy source. From an economics perspective it also costs 4% more than solar now. There is no excuse to bring back 1800's steam technology.
If you grill, use charcoal because it is short-term carbon cycle neutral.
We have one of the largest global coal deposits, but it is also one of the most contaminated natural hot heavy metal sources currently known. Indeed, the natural run off has already closed many water wells for small towns in the area. =3
and we've collected enough arsenic from a single mine to kill every human on the planet 300 times over in one spot- what's your point? That because we screwed up one spot we should give up?
Source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Giant_Mine
Whoa; TIL. It's terrifying the number of future-time-bombs we keep planting for ourselves.
Not sure why people buried your post, but many water-soluble metal salts are pretty toxic to animals and people.
In areas with natural Arsenic accumulation (or Acid rain run off), farmers will sometimes place rusting iron equipment in the water ways to reduce metals accumulating in the topsoil.
With low rainfall the evaporated well-water problem can certainly be a serious concern. =3
>farmers will sometimes place rusting iron equipment in the water ways to reduce metals accumulating in the topsoil.
Hoes does this work and related to the arsenic and acid rain?
Would have preferred a better source, but likely a similar process to the following:
https://wedc-knowledge.lboro.ac.uk/resources/conference/26/w...
Best of luck =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
Exactly. Most is not all and the ones that don't have striking traits in common ignored only by a fool.
> 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
None of it is lies. The CANDU reactors Canada has been operating for decades can run on spent fuel from legacy reactors and China actually uses them that way. The US hasn't built any of them, or any of the other designs that can do the same thing, in significant part because people keep presenting the circular reasoning that we shouldn't build newer reactors without dealing with nuclear waste when we should be dealing with nuclear waste by building newer reactors.
Indeed, Canada was also indirectly responsible for many Nuclear weapons proliferation issues in North Korea, India, and Pakistan. Selling small research reactors to emerging economies had long-term consequences.
As a side note, the CANDU are famously bad designs known to develop heavy maintenance costs even to remain operational. Yes these can run on garbage fuel, but only because other designs could never tolerate such waste.
It is a teachable moment about legacy designs having unintended benefits as well. =3
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=QNQu_3VQYAE
> Indeed, Canada was also indirectly responsible for many Nuclear weapons proliferation issues in North Korea, India, and Pakistan. Selling small research reactors to emerging economies had long-term consequences.
What does that have to do with how the US can deal with spent fuel? The reactors that consume spent fuel are ordinary power generating reactors rather than small research reactors and the US already has nuclear weapons.
> As a side note, the CANDU are famously bad designs known to develop heavy maintenance costs even to remain operational
The CANDU design is from the 1960s. It's not what you would actually use for a new project, it's an empirical demonstration that reactors that run on spent fuel are a real thing that actually exist rather than merely a theoretical possibility. There are also modern designs under construction in Europe and the same company is partnering with a US company to permanently destroy some of the US government's cold war era plutonium.
>What does that have to do with how the US can deal with spent fuel?
Unlike France, the US did not use a closed-loop multi-grade fuel cycle for economic reasons.
>an empirical demonstration that reactors that run on spent fuel
It is more complex, as running on low-grade fuel is not the same as running on spent-fuel.
However, China's recent Thorium reactor facility is interesting, and it would be neat to see some real data on its output. The US shuttered their own facility a long time back, but it is unclear why the research was effectively abandoned. There probably was a legitimate reason, but who knows for sure. =3
> Unlike France, the US did not use a closed-loop multi-grade fuel cycle for economic reason
Those are the existing reactors. The premise is building new ones of a different design.
> It is more complex, as running on low-grade fuel is not the same as running on spent-fuel.
It has to be accounted for but it's not some kind of impossible sorcery.
> The US shuttered their own facility a long time back, but it is unclear why the research was effectively abandoned. There probably was a legitimate reason, but who knows for sure.
There is a lot of politics involved in energy in general and nuclear in particular.
There's no such thing as a closed-loop fuel cycle - that would be perpetual motion.
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
And why am I supposed to care? Because plutonium sounds scary?
>And why am I supposed to care?
Indeed, one persons opinion is not really all that important, but one is alive because of decisions made long before they were born.
>Because plutonium sounds scary?
Which of the 14 isotopes are you referring too? In general, synthetic isotopes unknown in our evolutionary biology are far more toxic in trace exposures.
Some people don't get a chance to learn form their mistakes. Best of luck =3
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
who gives a shit
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.
They aren't part of the executive branch, period. The president has no control over their pay or performance. Hell, the president doesn't have nearly as much control over the executive branch as you imply, however much he might want it.
> They aren't part of the executive branch, period. The president has no control over their pay or performance.
They are run by the comptroller general who is appointed by the president meaning that the president has total control over who gets paid anything at all. Right now ours is just an "Acting Comptroller General" filling in until the president appoints someone else.
But Congress is very comfortable so far just letting the executive branch do whatever. Even if the orders aren't emanating from the oval office directly, there's clearly a coordinated agenda in motion. It's entirely reasonable to suspect that the GAO has been politicized in that environment.
You've just blindly asserted a whole bunch of things without laying out any sort of supporting arguments. What exactly makes the GAO not "part of the executive branch" ? My understanding is that "branches" are merely a framework used for describing government, not a prescriptive org chart. And how do the GAO's employees get paid, if not by a system that is now under the control of the autocratic Executive?
The branches are explicitly defined in the Constitution.
What we consider an the branches are defined in the Constitution, but my point is they are not simply defined as the top-level in a hierarchy of organizations, but rather behaviorally based on what function is being performed.
> What exactly makes the GAO not "part of the executive branch" ?
https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/31/702
>> (a)The Government Accountability Office is an instrumentality of the United States Government independent of the executive departments.
The law establishing it also establishes it as independent.
Sure, that is what is written down. But as a necessary part of its operation, there is a whole lot of executive power being exercised as well, which the unitary executive theory says would fall under the authority of the president.
> 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.
You must have missed the Chevron doctrine case where the supreme court took much of the ability for Congress to give away their power to the executive in the guise of creating agencies.
No one is claiming that the recent rulings have been consistent, just that they're making it pretty clear that they're happy to pretty much abolish any semblance of Independency for agencies (other than the Fed, which of course is a great example of how inconsistent they're willing to be in pretending that somehow there's a constitutional basis for it being a special snowflake among all of the other agencies)
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?
> 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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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-do...
I don't necessarily think you're wrong but I do think it's a non sequitur. The broader geopolitical and economic situation surrounding the advent of AI and datacenters has approximately nothing to do with the way the most recent US election went.
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.
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?
They had access to uranium sourced cheaply from former North African colonies, but now they no longer have that access.
We have ample deposits and (for now) easy access to Canadian deposits. I imagine that there are deals in place to secure that access at an efficient price given the national security angle at play.
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"