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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).

> $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?

> 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.

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.

> $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.

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

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

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

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

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...

"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

> 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.

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

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.

> 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.

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

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

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

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?

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

> China's numbers have always been almost wholly manufactured

Do you have a link to read about this?

> 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.