GAO: DOE Is Prematurely Excluding Less Expensive Options for Nuclear Cleanup

gao.gov248 pointsby Jimmc414123 comments

Discussion summary

The GAO criticizes the DOE for prematurely excluding cheaper nuclear cleanup options. Discussions include regulatory challenges, environmental impacts, and the feasibility of long-term waste containment.

What the discussion says

Some argue nuclear waste disposal regulations are being loosened prematurely.
Others highlight the environmental impact of China's coal plants compared to nuclear waste.
Concerns about the safety and longevity of nuclear waste containment methods.
Debate over the regulatory environment and market incentives for nuclear energy.

“GAO criticizes DOE for prematurely excluding cheaper cleanup options.”
— calvinmorrison

“Can one make safe nuclear reactors? The challenge is long-term waste containment.”
— zer00eyz

Comments

Hacker News

nuclear clean up is a joke. The emissions from chinas coal burning plants is 10000000000000000000000000000000000000 times worse than chucking nuclear waste in the desert at random

by calvinmorrison

> The emissions from chinas coal burning plants is 10000000000000000000000000000000000000 times worse than chucking nuclear waste in the desert at random

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"

by pinkmuffinere

Not like America’s Beautiful Clean Coal.

by blitzar

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).

by dakolli

> 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.

by zer00eyz

Can Tolkien's estate please do something?

by Pxtl

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?

by lclarkmichalek

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

by fc417fc802

> 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.

by Jtsummers

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

by Joel_Mckay

I think storing nuclear waste was decided to be a bad idea a long time ago.

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?

by jlarocco

99.99% of the radiation is gone after 300 years, so you don't really have to.

by consensus1

dilation procedures will fix that Joel!

by freestanding

> most off-site containment storage sites over 10 years old have failed to stop containment leaks

There's nothing obvious I could find that I could find that would confirm it. Could you cite something?

by viraptor

> Sure, but has anyone ever built a container that lasts 30k years, and remains watertight?

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.

by AnthonyMouse

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.

by margalabargala

saving is always great!

by freestanding

Now this is a future 100 billion dollar industry!

by random__duck

sorry there is absolutely no federal agency that has not been compromised at this point

you'd have to prove to me that Russell Vought has not tampered with an agency for any statement emerging to be believed

even jobs numbers are not believed by wallstreet anymore

and surpreme court has now said only Fed is off limits to protect their own money

redo this report in 2029

by ck2

If you've believed all the government data for the last 10 or 15 years I got a bridge for sale. It's one of those things like, yes, it's WAY more difficult than I think most people realize to arrive at numbers (be it employment, price indexes, etc), but it's also something that demonstrably can be done. It's like "space is hard", yes, but rocket companies still rightfully get flak if they can't perform.

Also, for what it's worth, it's a global phenomenon. China's numbers have always been almost wholly manufactured, but to be fair to them that was intentional. Across the West there's been a slow eroding of quality that they didn't intend necessarily, but has just been the effect of focusing on anything beyond pure merit in hiring and accuracy in measurement. Focus softened at exactly the time COVID made things more difficult, and the focus has only got worse. Ex: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/06/30/treasury-dit... Yeah that's going to work out great.

That said, I think GAO and CBO both do decent jobs at extremely thankless tasks. They both produce research and recommendations that are typically sound but get ignored by Congress 99.99% of the time.

by mrngld

People will both-sides this, but you are right. When your express purpose and position is to promote unitary executive theory and destroy US democracy, everything is suspect.

Marketplace (APM) has had several discussions about how difficult it is to mess with BLS numbers, but it's only a matter of time as Vought and Heritage make their way into these organizations.

by chad_c

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.

by actionfromafar

Why not both?

by falcor84

It's funny how this kind of pricing works. A bag of weed captured is estimated at a thousand dollars. Ten movies pirated at twice that. We fire a JASSM in combat and it costs a lot of money. We fire it in training and it costs nothing. There is no financial impact estimated to require all elevators be big enough to turn a full length gurney around. A wealth tax will yield revenue for the next thirty years at 30 times what it will yield this year. $6.6 billion will end world hunger but $100 billion is better spent on a train between Bakersfield and Fresno.

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.

by arjie

Tangential:

https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/nuclear-regulatory-c...

by CircuitSeuss

Also:

https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-...

by lelandfe

This isn't about radioactivity at all. It's about the millions of pounds of mercury used at the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge,[1] resulting in a lot of low-level mercury contamination.

[1] https://ehss.energy.gov/ohre/new/findingaids/epidemiologic/o...

by Animats

It's highly likely that the waste is mixed waste, meaning rad + mercury. Much tougher to treat than just rad or mercury.

by jhoydich

Wait the giant deadly ball of mercury that is highly radioactive for neutron studies? Or is this another mercury thing there?

by Balgair

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.

by jjk166

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Hacker News
nuclear clean up is a joke. The emissions from chinas coal burning plants is 10000000000000000000000000000000000000 times worse than chucking nuclear waste in the desert at random
by calvinmorrison
> The emissions from chinas coal burning plants is 10000000000000000000000000000000000000 times worse than chucking nuclear waste in the desert at random
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"
by pinkmuffinere
Not like America’s Beautiful Clean Coal.
by blitzar
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).
by dakolli
> 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.
by zer00eyz
Can Tolkien's estate please do something?
by Pxtl
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?
by lclarkmichalek
Is it really that weird? The regulatory morass suddenly starts opening up when enough money is involved. Seems almost like a universal truth.
by fc417fc802
> 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.
by Jtsummers
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
by Joel_Mckay
I think storing nuclear waste was decided to be a bad idea a long time ago.
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?
by jlarocco
99.99% of the radiation is gone after 300 years, so you don't really have to.
by consensus1
dilation procedures will fix that Joel!
by freestanding
> most off-site containment storage sites over 10 years old have failed to stop containment leaks
There's nothing obvious I could find that I could find that would confirm it. Could you cite something?
by viraptor
> Sure, but has anyone ever built a container that lasts 30k years, and remains watertight?
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.
by AnthonyMouse
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.
by margalabargala
saving is always great!
by freestanding
Now this is a future 100 billion dollar industry!
by random__duck
sorry there is absolutely no federal agency that has not been compromised at this point
you'd have to prove to me that Russell Vought has not tampered with an agency for any statement emerging to be believed
even jobs numbers are not believed by wallstreet anymore
and surpreme court has now said only Fed is off limits to protect their own money
redo this report in 2029
by ck2
If you've believed all the government data for the last 10 or 15 years I got a bridge for sale. It's one of those things like, yes, it's WAY more difficult than I think most people realize to arrive at numbers (be it employment, price indexes, etc), but it's also something that demonstrably can be done. It's like "space is hard", yes, but rocket companies still rightfully get flak if they can't perform.
Also, for what it's worth, it's a global phenomenon. China's numbers have always been almost wholly manufactured, but to be fair to them that was intentional. Across the West there's been a slow eroding of quality that they didn't intend necessarily, but has just been the effect of focusing on anything beyond pure merit in hiring and accuracy in measurement. Focus softened at exactly the time COVID made things more difficult, and the focus has only got worse. Ex: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/politics/2026/06/30/treasury-dit... Yeah that's going to work out great.
That said, I think GAO and CBO both do decent jobs at extremely thankless tasks. They both produce research and recommendations that are typically sound but get ignored by Congress 99.99% of the time.
by mrngld
People will both-sides this, but you are right. When your express purpose and position is to promote unitary executive theory and destroy US democracy, everything is suspect.
Marketplace (APM) has had several discussions about how difficult it is to mess with BLS numbers, but it's only a matter of time as Vought and Heritage make their way into these organizations.
by chad_c
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.
by actionfromafar
Why not both?
by falcor84
It's funny how this kind of pricing works. A bag of weed captured is estimated at a thousand dollars. Ten movies pirated at twice that. We fire a JASSM in combat and it costs a lot of money. We fire it in training and it costs nothing. There is no financial impact estimated to require all elevators be big enough to turn a full length gurney around. A wealth tax will yield revenue for the next thirty years at 30 times what it will yield this year. $6.6 billion will end world hunger but $100 billion is better spent on a train between Bakersfield and Fresno.
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.
by arjie
Tangential:
https://arstechnica.com/science/2026/07/nuclear-regulatory-c...
by CircuitSeuss
Also:
https://www.npr.org/2026/01/28/nx-s1-5677187/nuclear-safety-...
by lelandfe
This isn't about radioactivity at all. It's about the millions of pounds of mercury used at the Y-12 plant at Oak Ridge,[1] resulting in a lot of low-level mercury contamination.
[1] https://ehss.energy.gov/ohre/new/findingaids/epidemiologic/o...
by Animats
It's highly likely that the waste is mixed waste, meaning rad + mercury. Much tougher to treat than just rad or mercury.
by jhoydich
Wait the giant deadly ball of mercury that is highly radioactive for neutron studies? Or is this another mercury thing there?
by Balgair
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.
by jjk166