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"
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.
Isn't this the opposite of how a wealth tax works? The annual turnover for e.g. Apple stock is ~0.4%, so a 0.8%/year wealth tax would triple the number of sellers without adding any new buyers. The negative effect on the price is outsized because most people hold long-term rather than buying or selling in any given year, but now people have to liquidate some every year in order to pay the government because you're taxing unrealized gains. And then because "wealth" is calculated as share price times number of shares, when the share price goes down, everyone's "wealth" goes down and with it next year's revenue from a wealth tax.
There would be some limits on that in terms of the compounding negative effect on the share price because (among other things) if the price went down then foreign investors would find it more attractive to buy in and then they're not subject to the tax and don't have to sell every year to pay it, but causing more of the market to be owned by foreign rather than domestic taxpayers over time is also not a thing which leads to stable domestic tax revenue.
> $6.6 billion will end world hunger but $100 billion is better spent on a train between Bakersfield and Fresno.
The current UN estimate is more like $100 billion a year to end world hunger, whereas the initial build of a rail line is a one-time cost.
if you were to send me an article containing a new one of these each day, with citations, i would pay you $1 per day.
but if you were to send me an article containing a new one of these each day, with citations, plus a bunch of econ theory rationalizing it, i would pay you $0.
Edit: there's a button in the top-right that says "Secret Window"
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
Also, fission reactors make phenomenal sense on aircraft carriers, submarines, etc.
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.
Of course, all that is made possible by our pants-on-head stupid water rights laws.
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.
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.
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).
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7CXj0AGuh4c
I wouldn't worry about it, and have a wonderful day. =3
One is currently a problem, the other isn't.
"Nuclear fission: the worst energy source, except for almost all the other ones"
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
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
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
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.
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
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
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?
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
edit: Please don't down peoples karma for being crass. If it was a honest question they deserve an honest answer.
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.
[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".
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.
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 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.
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.
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.
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.
It's impossible to pretend like any agencies are functioning in any way as normal, are using objective scientific expert based assessments to govern.
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.
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.
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...
If you think the ruling class isn't making money coming and going I've got a bridge to sell you.
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.
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.
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.
Is it geographic (we have a lot more unused/undesirable than France, for example), regulatory, etc?
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.