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

https://www.gao.gov/products/gao-26-108193

by Jimmc414 • 16 days ago

277 175 16 days ago

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

falcor84• 16 days ago

Why not both?

anonym29• 16 days ago

I can think of about 39 trillion reasons... https://www.usdebtclock.org/

arjie• 16 days ago

It's funny how this kind of pricing works. A bag of weed captured is estimated at a thousand dollars. Ten movies pirated at twice that. We fire a JASSM in combat and it costs a lot of money. We fire it in training and it costs nothing. There is no financial impact estimated to require all elevators be big enough to turn a full length gurney around. A wealth tax will yield revenue for the next thirty years at 30 times what it will yield this year. $6.6 billion will end world hunger but $100 billion is better spent on a train between Bakersfield and Fresno.

I bought my car for $32k. To replace it would be $50k. I crash it, am I out $32k or $50k? Or some other number? Numerically, it could be anything.

AnthonyMouse12• 16 days ago

A wealth tax will yield revenue for the next thirty years at 30 times what it will yield this year.

Isn't this the opposite of how a wealth tax works? The annual turnover for e.g. Apple stock is ~0.4%, so a 0.8%/year wealth tax would triple the number of sellers without adding any new buyers. The negative effect on the price is outsized because most people hold long-term rather than buying or selling in any given year, but now people have to liquidate some every year in order to pay the government because you're taxing unrealized gains. And then because "wealth" is calculated as share price times number of shares, when the share price goes down, everyone's "wealth" goes down and with it next year's revenue from a wealth tax.

There would be some limits on that in terms of the compounding negative effect on the share price because (among other things) if the price went down then foreign investors would find it more attractive to buy in and then they're not subject to the tax and don't have to sell every year to pay it, but causing more of the market to be owned by foreign rather than domestic taxpayers over time is also not a thing which leads to stable domestic tax revenue.

$6.6 billion will end world hunger but $100 billion is better spent on a train between Bakersfield and Fresno.

The current UN estimate is more like $100 billion a year to end world hunger, whereas the initial build of a rail line is a one-time cost.

dnnehgf• 16 days ago

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.

Hendrikto• 15 days ago

$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.

Veelox• 15 days ago

$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?

gunapologist992• 15 days ago

wealth tax

This isn't directed at your excellent comment, but about wealth tax in general (and the proposed California version specifically);

Should we tax the very people who are literally creating the future before they've even done so?

The progressive views on a wealth tax are an incredibly shocking blind spot, esp on this site, begun by those who are immersed in startups and believers that risking (venturing?) to pursue tech ventures can bring about a more excellent future for everyone, not just the founders. We dare to imagine a future that does not exist, and then we believe in it until it does.

If anything, we want to lubricate that path, not add friction. Hitting the VC's or founders who've made it hits everyone, all the way down the line.

dakolli3• 16 days ago

A bunch of these nuclear power startups have started reached criticality over the last week. Aalo and Valar (thiel) and now GAO is trying to loosen regulations around nuclear waste disposal.. Makes sense.

Weird how we only get green energy when it's necessary for the technocratic class to power their data centers (and when they are small enough to be flown on location for the military, so the military can destroy a nations power production capabilities and still be able to power their invasions).

During Valar's announcement this week regarding achieving their goals of nuclear power generation they did a tech-style keynote address where they powered a nvidia blackwell GPU and "hosted a website with it" (lol).

lclarkmichalek• 16 days ago

Isn’t it a fairly natural (and useful) capitalist outcome that as prices rise incentives to increase supply increase? What’s technocratic about responding to a demand change?

dakolli3• 16 days ago

because they have infiltrated the government to reduce the cost of safety, and increase the possibility of environmental harm to pad their margins... faster shit code, AI cat videos and so they can add 100ft to the length of their next boat?

fc417fc8024• 16 days ago

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

Jtsummers2• 16 days ago

now "doge" (GAO)

GAO is not DOGE. For those who don't know the difference between the two, confusing them is about like confusing the President with the Senate. GAO is a Congressional agency, it does not fall under the Executive. Its purpose is in its name, and it does a pretty good job of it. It also cannot, on its own (unlike how DOGE was empowered) effect any change. They can only conduct studies and make recommendations, it's up to Congress and the relevant Executive branch agencies to address the recommendations or not.

(GAO) is trying to loosen regulations around nuclear waste disposal.

This is not about loosening regulations, it's about DOE Office of Environmental Management not following its own guidance when documenting mission needs (which happen before Analysis of Alternatives (AOA). The problem GAO is identifying here is relatively minor (compared to other problems their other studies have found), but potentially costly, in that they have identified numerous instances of proposing a particular solution too early, which can constrain what's considered later on during the AOA effort.

payphonefiend• 16 days ago

A sane and well put together comment. Thank you. This should be the standard for discussion here.

Terr_3• 16 days ago

I suspect parent-poster simply intended to write OMB [0] instead. Perhaps because both initialisms [1] refer to government groups that sometimes publish important reports about budgets.

[0] https://prospect.org/2026/02/05/doge-russell-vought-elon-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".

dakolli3• 16 days ago

I mixed up some names. The timing doesn't seem coincidental. We are at the end of Executive Order 14301, signed May 2025, which called for at least three test reactors to reach criticality by July 4, 2026.

So immediately after Trumps nuclear power project ends (of which his son's and all his friends are invested in these neo-nuclear power companies), and a bunch of companies reach criticality this week, the government starts issuing orders to make things easier for them to be profitable.

Your naive to think it's anything else other than corruption.

mindslight4• 16 days ago

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.

CobrastanJorji• 16 days ago

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.

Pxtl2• 16 days ago

Can Tolkien's estate please do something?

Terr_3• 16 days ago

In seriousness, probably not, unless US "intellectual property" law gets worse somehow.

Short phrases fall under trademarks rather than copyrights, and even then it needs to be something that would cause commercial confusion, and very few people are going to buy a Tolkien book expecting a nuclear reactor or vice-versa.

zer00eyz2• 16 days ago

is trying to loosen regulations around nuclear waste disposal

And here lies the problem that ever one wants to burry their head in the sand about.

Can one, in theory, make safe nuclear reactors. You bet you can.

The thing is that you cant leave a bunch of "we will deal with that later" problems laying around. In the case of the US thats spent fuel rods. Should one worry about these, no, but you also don't want them as the slats on your kids mattress frame. They are fine where they are.

The French, because of fuel constraints, built fuel reprocessing into their nuclear "system" (and it is that, a whole system). We just leave spent fuel sitting around as a "later problem", because for us, its just much cheaper to mine and refine more uranium than it is to clean up the "spent" fuel we have.

The moment that you need to build in reprocessing (and solve that pesky later problem) the economics of nuclear stop making sense.

fc417fc8024• 16 days ago

Whether or not waste is reprocessed there will be high level waste that needs to be disposed of. It's merely a matter of volume produced per unit of energy. Either approach is entirely reasonable.

The inability of the US to formally approve a permanent disposal site is purely political. Still, at this point enough other countries have managed to do so that we might eventually be able to pay to export our waste to one of them instead of solving our own dysfunction.

__float2• 16 days ago

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?

consensus13• 15 days ago

Why can't you? All other forms of power generation do that.

jjk1663• 16 days ago

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

chris_va3• 15 days ago

To play devil's advocate, the counter argument is that it's always easy to advocate for more process, and cherry pick examples to support that conclusion.

The actual report basically says that the DOE already requires that they "should identify a need without having a particular solution already in mind", so it is really just an argument that people should follow the written guidelines, and add more process to make sure it happens. The examples in the report are pretty nuanced.

bruckie• 15 days ago

That's about what I would expect from an organization named Government Accountability Office: hold the government accountable to its written guidelines (or at least report on how well it's doing at meeting them).

ortusdux• 15 days ago

Unless I'm missing something, footnote #20 at the end of the 43 page report significantly undercuts their argument. It is easy to make a clear and succinct report that comes to the conclusion you want.

jjk1663• 15 days ago

I don't see how it undercuts their argument. At best it means the DOE was following the spirit of their standards and the mission need statement was simply created later in the process than it should have been. It's still questionable though whether that prior planning actually considered and evaluated options as open-mindedly as if it had been done by the appropriate process.

Joel_Mckay18• 16 days ago

Sure, but has anyone ever built a container that lasts 30k years, and remains watertight?

Thus far, most off-site containment storage sites over 10 years old have failed to stop containment leaks, Radon gas diffusion, or hot-material fires. Fission reactors are a 1950's loss-leader technology, and only make sense for already uninhabitable areas like space. =3

margalabargala2• 16 days ago

There are plenty of dry areas like in the American Southwest which can be projected to not have meaningful water attempt ingress in that time frame.

Also, fission reactors make phenomenal sense on aircraft carriers, submarines, etc.

bobmcnamara• 16 days ago

We've already leached too much uranium into the groundwater for many to drink just from the mining alone.

Joel_Mckay18• 16 days ago

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

AnthonyMouse12• 16 days ago

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.

Joel_Mckay18• 16 days ago

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

jlarocco• 16 days ago

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?

Joel_Mckay18• 15 days ago

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

chickenbig7• 15 days ago

if something is radioactive enough to be a hazard then it's radioactive enough to generate power

Only under certain circumstances is it financially worth harnessing this power. I think of space probes and their RTGs. They use alpha emitters like Pu-238, to minimize the shielding requirements.

As for the rest of the stuff, dry casks are good enough. Reprocessing isn’t currently economical while uranium is so cheap, although the vitrification of the fission products can help immobilize the worst radiation emitters, but really the UO2 structure does a decent job of keeping things put.

consensus13• 15 days ago

99.99% of the radiation is gone after 300 years, so you don't really have to.

Joel_Mckay18• 15 days ago

"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

viraptor• 15 days ago

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?

Joel_Mckay18• 15 days ago

Indeed, signal-to-noise ratio on the modern web is fairly challenging search space, but there was DoE documentation out there showing near zero practical success rate at actual long-term disposal sites. Every site has shown some concrete degradation within years, reported incidents, water ingress, and persistent operational costs. Current methodology is to pile up waste near cooling ponds, and lie to people about dealing with it at some point in the future.

My point was, few organizations have ever shown actual success with what they claimed would happen. Thus, arguing sites will hold for 75 years let alone 30k years is a fools errand. Water fills holes in the ground, and will likely continue to do so in the future. =3

https://armscontrolcenter.org/nuclear-waste-issues-in-the-un...

https://www.cnsc-ccsn.gc.ca/eng/acts-and-regulations/event-r...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_and_radiation_accident...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_military_nuclear_accid...

CircuitSeuss• 16 days ago

Tangential:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/nuclear-regulatory-c...

lelandfe• 16 days ago

Also:

https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-...

random__duck• 16 days ago

Now this is a future 100 billion dollar industry!

calvinmorrison• 16 days ago

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

pinkmuffinere• 16 days ago

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

I don't think you're wrong per-se, but I think your claim could be simplified to "the impact of the common alternatives are 1000000000000000 times worse than nuclear waste"

blitzar• 15 days ago

Not like America’s Beautiful Clean Coal.

Animats2• 15 days ago

This isn't about radioactivity at all. It's about the millions of pounds of mercury used at the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge,[1] resulting in a lot of low-level mercury contamination.

[1] https://ehss.energy.gov/ohre/new/findingaids/epidemiologic/o...

jhoydich• 15 days ago

It's highly likely that the waste is mixed waste, meaning rad + mercury. Much tougher to treat than just rad or mercury.

Balgair• 15 days ago

Wait the giant deadly ball of mercury that is highly radioactive for neutron studies? Or is this another mercury thing there?

Animats2• 15 days ago

Mercury used in some kind of electrolysis process for extracting lithium from something, apparently. Has to do with tritium production.

crote• 15 days ago

I am quite confused about the mercury contamination being mentioned, to be honest.

There's a huge amount of mercury contamination at Y-12. The DoE wants to clean it up. The DoE asks for proposals for building an on-site plant capable of cleaning it up. And that's somehow... bad?

What's supposed to be the alternative here: shipping thousands of tonnes of contaminated dirt to an offsite processing plant? Dumping it all in the nearest lake? Burying it and pretending it doesn't exist?

There are dozens of examples of government agencies laser-focusing on one specific solution, but I just don't see how this case is bad enough that it warrants being explicitly mentioned as an example of the DoE not allowing for enough alternatives.

ck2• 15 days ago

sorry there is absolutely no federal agency that has not been compromised at this point

you'd have to prove to me that Russell Vought has not tampered with an agency for any statement emerging to be believed

even jobs numbers are not believed by wallstreet anymore

and surpreme court has now said only Fed is off limits to protect their own money

redo this report in 2029

mrngld• 15 days ago

If you've believed all the government data for the last 10 or 15 years I got a bridge for sale. It's one of those things like, yes, it's WAY more difficult than I think most people realize to arrive at numbers (be it employment, price indexes, etc), but it's also something that demonstrably can be done. It's like "space is hard", yes, but rocket companies still rightfully get flak if they can't perform.

Also, for what it's worth, it's a global phenomenon. China's numbers have always been almost wholly manufactured, but to be fair to them that was intentional. Across the West there's been a slow eroding of quality that they didn't intend necessarily, but has just been the effect of focusing on anything beyond pure merit in hiring and accuracy in measurement. Focus softened at exactly the time COVID made things more difficult, and the focus has only got worse. Ex: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/06/30/treasury-dit... Yeah that's going to work out great.

That said, I think GAO and CBO both do decent jobs at extremely thankless tasks. They both produce research and recommendations that are typically sound but get ignored by Congress 99.99% of the time.

jasonlotito• 15 days ago

If you've believed all the government data for the last 10 or 15 years I got a bridge for sale.

It's not about belief. It's about trust. And as they say: trust, but verify.

We could trust the data, but we should, of course, verify it. And that's generally how it worked. And both sides of the aisle happily trusted this data and verified it. It wasn't always correct, but not so much that you should start by not trusting it at all.

But now we are at that point. I've taken the attitude of simply assuming the opposite and starting from that position, and it has served me well most of the time. I take what the current administration is claiming, assume the opposite and start from there.

To be fair, I agree with your sentiment, don't just believe what the government is saying. But there has been a dramatic shift since January 2024.

throwaway274482• 15 days ago

China's numbers have always been almost wholly manufactured

Do you have a link to read about this?

chad_c• 15 days ago

People will both-sides this, but you are right. When your express purpose and position is to promote unitary executive theory and destroy US democracy, everything is suspect.

Marketplace (APM) has had several discussions about how difficult it is to mess with BLS numbers, but it's only a matter of time as Vought and Heritage make their way into these organizations.

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

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