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.
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.
Now this is a future 100 billion dollar industry!
saving is always great!
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.
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"
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.
> 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.
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.
> 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.
I mean… the fact that it is an agency of the legislative branch is what makes it not an agency of the executive branch? It is not run by, does not answer to, and does not have personnel or pay decisions made by the President or by anybody the President is the boss of—mainly by design, since its whole job is to criticize the executive branch’s activities.
It is an independent office of the legislature of the United States, paid for from its own appropriations, and the president can no more fire its staff than he can fire a Senator.
There is one touchpoint: the statute provides that its boss, the Comptroller General, is appointed to their 15-year term by the president—although that’s subject to Senate confirmation. The acting Comptroller General was appointed by her predecessor, not by the president.
I think the assertion that requires defending is that the president secretly “controls” the nitty gritty of GAO’s investigations and reporting…
The branches are explicitly defined in the Constitution.
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.
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.
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.
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?