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Comment by ncmncm | Hacker News Reader

Fully half the development cost, and all of the construction and deployment cost of the first few placements, was picked up my US taxpayers. But Bill Gates and cronies retain 100% ownership.

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> But Bill Gates and cronies retain 100% ownership.

NuScale is publicly traded. You can buy shares, the ticker is SMR.

The majority owner (about 60%) in NuScale is Fluor Corporation [1], another publicly traded company (FLR). The top 10 Fluor owners are mutual funds, such as BlackRock, Vanguard and Fidelity [2] . If your 401(k) is managed by one of these funds, chances are you own shares in FLR too.

I don't see how Bill Gates is involved in NuScale.

[1] https://newsroom.nuscalepower.com/press-releases/news-detail...

[2] https://money.cnn.com/quote/shareholders/shareholders.html?s...

The state should still own a large chunk of it.

the (US) state is too (politically) biased/volatile to manage even something that isnt basic science. look at Nasa. And btw this is an investment wich could create more economic activities and down the line tax revenue.

Look at the Tennessee Valley Authority.

Our governments do have a lot of problems, so the solution is to make not formally a part of the state to get around a lot of bullshit.

But why? To get a dividend? The state gets to tax the profits. To tell the management how to run the business? The state has the NRC, which can pretty much tell a company like NuScale what they can do and what they can't.

> To tell the management how to run the business?

This

> The state has the NRC, which can pretty much tell a company like NuScale what they can do and what they can't.

Regulatory agencies can only say "no". They can only "make things happen" by saying no to other options. That is not good enough.

We have a stagnant government and society built around "no" --- NIMBYism and all the clientelist back-scratching that goes with it. That's not good enough.

I want a state that can do things actually make them happen.

Absolutely

I DO not trust anyone other than president Biden to handle such sensitive matters!

Greedy billionaires should have no say in this

Jist noting that most of the cost was regulatory as well. So I am not really sure you can say the government "on the whole" helped it. I mean, just look at this approval timeline, totally insane. Hundreds of millions to get approval on a design generally regarded as safe, for a product whose track record is very safe (measured in injuries/deaths per watt produced).

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