Hacker News Reader

Comment by dakolli | Hacker News Reader

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).

View on HN

> 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.

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

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".

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.

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.

You've just blindly asserted a whole bunch of things without laying out any sort of supporting arguments. What exactly makes the GAO not "part of the executive branch" ? My understanding is that "branches" are merely a framework used for describing government, not a prescriptive org chart. And how do the GAO's employees get paid, if not by a system that is now under the control of the autocratic Executive?

> 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.

Sure, that is what is written down. But as a necessary part of its operation, there is a whole lot of executive power being exercised as well, which the unitary executive theory says would fall under the authority of the president.

The branches are explicitly defined in the Constitution.

What we consider an the branches are defined in the Constitution, but my point is they are not simply defined as the top-level in a hierarchy of organizations, but rather behaviorally based on what function is being performed.

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.

> They aren't part of the executive branch, period. The president has no control over their pay or performance.

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.

> 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.

You must have missed the Chevron doctrine case where the supreme court took much of the ability for Congress to give away their power to the executive in the guise of creating agencies.

No one is claiming that the recent rulings have been consistent, just that they're making it pretty clear that they're happy to pretty much abolish any semblance of Independency for agencies (other than the Fed, which of course is a great example of how inconsistent they're willing to be in pretending that somehow there's a constitutional basis for it being a special snowflake among all of the other agencies)

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

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.

I thought that was mostly about coincidentally similar names.

Does it change when one is explicitly a reference to the copyrighted work? It's not like Thiel just thinks that Valar and Palantir and Anduril etc are all just nice sounding words, he's built a brand out of companies named after Tolkien's stuff.

I happen to know for a fact that Palantir licenses the name from the estate at an exorbitant yearly fee.

IANAL but I would assume that such an agreement (A) falls under trademark law and (B) is being done to avoid a costly/embarrassing fight, even if it's a fight Thiel might win.

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.

The presumption of regularity here is a joke. This administration has grifted swindled no-bid awarded and bought out anything they please with reckless abandon, Vought is actively Project 2025 shutting done any and everything not run by the most fanatical political operatives.

It's impossible to pretend like any agencies are functioning in any way as normal, are using objective scientific expert based assessments to govern.

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.

The previous party left opposition party people in power many times. Which, like, is how the US has worked for a century and a half. It was not a spoils system, in 98% of cases.

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.

The point is that this method of grift isn't new or partisan. The magnitude is what is new.

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.

How many orders of magnitude do you need to recognize a distinction? I think it's just silly ridiculous nonsense to say this is "just" orders of magnitude difference. At what point do we accept or not accept what feels like the most irrelevant smokescreen cover excuse?

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...

I don't necessarily think you're wrong but I do think it's a non sequitur. The broader geopolitical and economic situation surrounding the advent of AI and datacenters has approximately nothing to do with the way the most recent US election went.

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.

> 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.

> there will be high level waste that needs to be disposed of

Fortunately it is self disposing, decaying away. Unlikely plain old mercury or arsenic.

The "high level waste" is the stuff that takes 10k years to decay.

The big things that you get out of reprocessing nuclear fuel (other than usable uranium) are plutonium, Strontium, cesium ... the rest of the material left over (4%) gets embedded in glass and dumped in a deep pit and forgotten about.

The things we might use (plutonium, strontium) have some rather "questionable" applications:

https://thedefensepost.com/2026/07/08/darpa-nuclear-waste-dr...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/India–United_States_espionage_...

> The "high level waste" is the stuff that takes 10k years to decay.

Well, there are many definitions, for instance https://ukinventory.nda.gov.uk/information-hub/factsheets/wh... is from the UK.

> The big things that you get out of reprocessing nuclear fuel

You generally extract the trans-uranics from fission products. The former needs more specific treatment to deal with their longer half lives (or turning into MOX, which ends up more expensive than using normal uranium). The latter get vitrified (who needs the Sr or Cs, really).

> The things we might use (plutonium, strontium) have some rather "questionable" applications:

The Pu-238 for the RTG is generally produced in trace quantities in reactors, with reactor grade plutonium containing mostly Pu-239 and Pu-240.

I'm not a huge fan of these tiny RTG sources either. Spacecraft yes, otherwise ... proven to be somewhat dangerous when they become orphaned.

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?

They had access to uranium sourced cheaply from former North African colonies, but now they no longer have that access.

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.

Ah, you meant differences in access to fuel, not differences in storing the waste.

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

Reply on news.ycombinator.com