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