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

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

#101

Post by inigyou »

Joel_Mckay wrote: post #92
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 nuc…

>What does that have to do with how the US can deal with spent fuel? Unlike France, the US did not use a closed-loop multi-grade fuel cycle for economic reasons. >an empirical demonstration that reactors that run on spent fuel It is more complex, as running on low-grade fuel is not the same as running on spent-fuel. However, China's recent Thorium reactor facility is interesting, and it would be neat to see some real…

There's no such thing as a closed-loop fuel cycle - that would be perpetual motion.

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

#102

Post by datsci_est_2015 »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #88
datsci_est_2015 wrote: post #83

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 anythi…

> 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.

Property tax breaks in my locale lead to empty lots and empty buildings, which is the least efficient use of land imaginable. Property value seems to play a significant enough role in convincing land owners to sell their underutilized land if property taxes provide the activation energy to force them to sell. Otherwise they sit and speculate. So, your argument is convincing in theory, but appears to fall apart in practice. Aside, I’m a fan of Georgism in theory.

> 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.

I’m sure wealth managers are already devising strategies for reducing taxable wealth based on speculative laws and regulations. This shouldn’t be a reason not to proceed, but instead to put more resources to effective design.

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

#103

Post by scottlamb »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #66
arjie wrote: post #54

Earlier 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 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.

Is that assuming the tax money is going into the void? I agree it might force roughly 0.8% of shares to be sold in a given year. But as to not adding any new buyers: no one's being forced to buy stock in the same way, but shouldn't someone be getting the money and potentially using it to buy Apple stock?

Let's imagine for a second the wealth tax money is simply given to people who are below the threshold. Most of them may waste it on silly things like food and rent, but some might end up with a surplus and become investors. Same effect if say the income tax is lowered to make the wealth tax revenue-neutral. Or if say it's used to expand Medicare. It's hard to for me to imagine a way to spend taxes that doesn't help someone. Even if the money is used on war—a net destruction of value and lives—there are some people selling missiles better off a result.

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

#104

Post by Y-bar »

iamnothere wrote: post #42
bobmcnamara wrote: post #37

Earlier quoted context omitted.

We've already leached too much uranium into the groundwater for many to drink just from the mining alone.

We’ve also already depleted many aquifers past the point of recovery. We have too many people to hydrate, too many crops to water in order to feed them, and not enough water. At some point widespread desalination is probably inevitable, but that requires a lot of energy. Or the public could accept a reduction in their standard of living, but that’s likely not happening without a civil war.

> At some point widespread desalination is probably inevitable, but that requires a lot of energy.

This might be true, but desalination is not without it's own externalities (not counting energy usage). The primary one I am thinking of is the increase in salinity and heat in the local area killing sea life. These issues may be possible to avoid with limited use of desalination today, but a significant increase in volume may reach a point where things like dilution and cooling by mixing does not have the desired effect.

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

#105

Post by Hendrikto »

arjie wrote: post #54
actionfromafar wrote: post #3

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.

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…

> $6.6 billion will end world hunger

And then you ask how, and you just get hand waving. Elon Musk offered the money if somebody would provide a coherent plan of how to solve world hunger with it. Nobody could.

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

#106

Post by roenxi »

scottlamb wrote: post #103
AnthonyMouse wrote: post #66

Earlier 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 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. Is that assuming the tax money is going into the void? I agree it might force roughly 0.8% of shares to be sold in a given year. But as to not adding any new buyers: no one's being forced to buy stock in the same way, but shouldn't someone be getting the money and potentiall…

Although the argument does look fundamentally reasonable, I think its biggest weakness is it doesn't make an attempt to prioritise - yes taxes always make someone better off. So does wealth. A decision has to be made. Which is more valuable? We've got a highly reliable and effective system for working that out (aka the free market economy) and no alternative in 2nd place that doesn't typically lead to mass starvation because someone underestimated how much food was needed. They people benefiting from the taxes are going to be making very different allocations to the places that the capital is being drained from.

The people behind wealth taxes generally handwave explaining how their system will be better at allocating than the people who make a living of allocating wealth effectively because it is all just obvious that it doesn't need to be justified. Poor people will get more money if rich people have less, duh, QED. So far no compelling cases where they've turned out to be right. If they could do a better job, why even allow private wealth at all?

> Even if the money is used on war—a net destruction of value and lives—there are some people selling missiles better off a result.

Case in point, there is a topical example of Trump going in to Iran like a maniac. Yes there are some people who are better off as a result who wouldn't have been. And yet we can be pretty confident that not forcing US citizens to fund the debacle would have been a better allocation of capital.

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

#107

Post by sehansen »

inigyou wrote: post #101
Joel_Mckay wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>What does that have to do with how the US can deal with spent fuel? Unlike France, the US did not use a closed-loop multi-grade fuel cycle for economic reasons. >an empirical demonstration that reactors that run on spent fuel It is more complex, as running on low-grade fuel is not the same as running on spent-fuel. However, China's recent Thorium reactor facility is interesting, and it would be neat to see some real…

There's no such thing as a closed-loop fuel cycle - that would be perpetual motion.

In a nuclear energy context "closed cycle" just means that the uranium and plutonium is separated out from the spent fuel for future reuse. The loop is only closed in the sense that some of the spent fuel material that leaves the reactor will enter it again in the future. It doesn't imply that new inputs won't be added to the loop.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nuclear_fuel_cycle_in_France#C...

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

#108

Post by fp_hub »

jjk166 wrote: post #20

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.

[flagged]

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

#109

Post by Skilving »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #66
arjie wrote: post #54

Earlier 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…

Your math is off by two orders of magnitude. Apple's *daily* turnover is 0.4%.

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

#110

Post by ck2 »

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

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