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
Not like America’s Beautiful Clean Coal.
GAO: DOE Is Prematurely Excluding Less Expensive Options for Nuclear Cleanup
81–90 of 188 posts
Re: GAO: DOE Is Prematurely Excluding Less Expensive Options for Nuclear Cleanup
#82Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 y…
The purpose of wealth taxes is redistributive, not revenue maximization of a spherical cow.
Re: GAO: DOE Is Prematurely Excluding Less Expensive Options for Nuclear Cleanup
#83Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
> 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 y…
Some disjointed thoughts of mine on this topic:
Some people have to adjust their mortgage in order to pay property taxes. Most people pay property taxes out of their income.
What percentage of Americans, especially home-owning Americans, have more wealth in the stock market than in their home?
Property tax has the positive effect of encouraging efficient land usage and discouraging speculation and rent seeking. Is there a parallel case to be made for stock holdings, or is such an argument dead in the water because land is more tangible than company shares?
Re: GAO: DOE Is Prematurely Excluding Less Expensive Options for Nuclear Cleanup
#84Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 y…
The purpose of wealth taxes is redistributive, not revenue maximization of a spherical cow.
I prefer the phrasing “more liquid and efficient allocation of capital” over “wealth redistribution”.
Re: GAO: DOE Is Prematurely Excluding Less Expensive Options for Nuclear Cleanup
#85Earlier quoted context omitted.
None of it is lies. The CANDU reactors Canada has been operating for decades can run on spent fuel from legacy reactors and China actually uses them that way. The US hasn't built any of them, or any of the other designs that can do the same thing, in significant part because people keep presenting the circular reasoning that we shouldn't build newer reactors without dealing with nuclear waste when we should be dealin…
Indeed, Canada was also indirectly responsible for many Nuclear weapons proliferation issues in North Korea, India, and Pakistan. Selling small research reactors to emerging economies had long-term consequences. As a side note, the CANDU are famously bad designs known to develop heavy maintenance costs even to remain operational. Yes these can run on garbage fuel, but only because other designs could never tolerate s…
> Indeed, Canada was also indirectly responsible for many Nuclear weapons proliferation issues in North Korea, India, and Pakistan. Selling small research reactors to emerging economies had long-term consequences.
What does that have to do with how the US can deal with spent fuel? The reactors that consume spent fuel are ordinary power generating reactors rather than small research reactors and the US already has nuclear weapons.
> As a side note, the CANDU are famously bad designs known to develop heavy maintenance costs even to remain operational
The CANDU design is from the 1960s. It's not what you would actually use for a new project, it's an empirical demonstration that reactors that run on spent fuel are a real thing that actually exist rather than merely a theoretical possibility. There are also modern designs under construction in Europe and the same company is partnering with a US company to permanently destroy some of the US government's cold war era plutonium.
Re: GAO: DOE Is Prematurely Excluding Less Expensive Options for Nuclear Cleanup
#86Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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)
Re: GAO: DOE Is Prematurely Excluding Less Expensive Options for Nuclear Cleanup
#87Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 y…
The purpose of wealth taxes is redistributive, not revenue maximization of a spherical cow.
What does that have to do with the revenue claim being questionable?
Also, if that was the goal, wouldn't it be better to tax (or break up) the corporations rather than the shareholders? It comes out of their pocket either way, but forcing asset sales has a lot of negative consequences and bad incentives. On top of that, it handles the problem that the CEO of a huge company has too much power regardless of what percentage of the company's stock they own, by reducing the size of the company rather than their ownership stake in it.
Re: GAO: DOE Is Prematurely Excluding Less Expensive Options for Nuclear Cleanup
#88Earlier quoted context omitted.
> 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 y…
Some disjointed thoughts of mine on this topic: Some people have to adjust their mortgage in order to pay property taxes. Most people pay property taxes out of their income. What percentage of Americans, especially home-owning Americans, have more wealth in the stock market than in their home? Property tax has the positive effect of encouraging efficient land usage and discouraging speculation and rent seeking. Is th…
> Some people have to adjust their mortgage in order to pay property taxes. Most people pay property taxes out of their income.
Most people get their income from wages and then pay the taxes with that. The people who are the target of a wealth tax get most of their income from investments and then to get money to pay a new tax would have to sell that proportion of the investments.
It also doesn't really change anything if they invest in the sort of things that give returns through dividends instead of share price increases, because they reinvest the dividends, and having fewer people buy the stock so they can use the money to pay the tax has the same negative effect on the share price as having more people sell the stock to use the money to pay the tax.
> Property tax has the positive effect of encouraging efficient land usage and discouraging speculation and rent seeking.
Property tax to the extent that it's a tax on buildings/construction does precisely the opposite. Where land is more scarce the most efficient use is to build a high rise to maximize the amount of indoor living space per unit land, which is exactly the thing property tax taxes and thereby disincentivizes.
Asset taxes in general create major perverse incentives because it causes underinvestment in the thing being taxed and overinvestment in any alternative that can act as a tax shelter, whether because the law exempts the alternative for some reason (e.g. lobbying), or it's hard to accurately value and therefore allows for chicanery, or it's in another jurisdiction.
Re: GAO: DOE Is Prematurely Excluding Less Expensive Options for Nuclear Cleanup
#89This 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.
To play devil's advocate, the counter argument is that it's always easy to advocate for more process, and cherry pick examples to support that conclusion.
The actual report basically says that the DOE already requires that they "should identify a need without having a particular solution already in mind", so it is really just an argument that people should follow the written guidelines, and add more process to make sure it happens. The examples in the report are pretty nuanced.
Re: GAO: DOE Is Prematurely Excluding Less Expensive Options for Nuclear Cleanup
#90This 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...