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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

#161

Post by scottlamb »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #158
scottlamb wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Even your straw man version of this argument is pretty convincing to me alongside graphs showing the extent…

> This is more a disagreement of values than facts, I think. It's a disagreement over policy. Increasing inequality is bad, the question is what's the best way to do something about it? There are many alternatives with better characteristics than a wealth tax, like antitrust enforcement to break up concentrated industries and lower corporate profits through increased competition, zoning reform to reduce housing costs…

> Increasing inequality is bad

I'm not at all sure everyone in these discussions agrees on this point!

I agree with you not only that this is bad but also that wealth taxes are not the only way to address it. They are a way that is getting momentum right now, AFAICT more than the other things you mentioned, and we may have to choose between voting for a wealth tax (or candidates who support one) or doing nothing.

fwiw, I'm really not sure which approach(es) I'd choose if I could single-handedly decide how to reduce wealth inequality.

> The high marginal rates in the mid-20th century were fake.

I think "federal receipts as a percent of GDP" isn't the right chart to answer this question. Overall tax rate != how progressive the tax is or how high the "effective" marginal tax rate is. On https://inequality.org/facts/wealth-inequality/ the "The Top .01% Don't Pay Their Fair Share as They Hoard More Wealth" shows a clear cross-over point where before about 1980 the top .01%'s share of tax was greater than their share of wealth, and after it reversed. That's consistent with the 1981 change I mentioned.

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

#162

Post by roenxi »

IanCal wrote: post #118
roenxi wrote: post #106

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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. This is an absolutely wild comparison. The choice is not "everything is purely market forces" vs "everything is centrally planned". We have all kinds of implementations across the wo…

> If wealth getting concentrated is so good, why not only allow one person to have everything? See how odd that seems?

Isn't that fairly close to what we have now? I don't see any theoretical issues. Obviously if we literally mean one person I don't think the market would pick that as an optimum outcome, but there isn't an issue with the idea in principle.

Besides, the alternative is to have a relative small committee that, in practice, decides when to give and when to take away. That is the most practical aspect of wealth control and there is still a small number of people controlling it.

> Sure. So we could ask, say, can we compare educating 500 children for 12 years vs Taylor Swifts net worth going from $2.1B to $2B? How much would she be hurt and how much would other benefit? What would be the impact if she was slightly less wealthy?

Worst case is she gets angry and a bunch of people go hungry and uneducated, she donates quite a lot of money. $26m going out some time soonish according to a recent heaadline. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2026/jul/02/taylor-swift-t.... She's more effective with that donation than getting outcomes like educating 500 kids. It turns out to be nontrivial coming up with good examples in practice.

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

#163

Post by scottlamb »

roenxi wrote: post #160
scottlamb wrote: post #117

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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. Even your straw man version of this argument is pretty convincing to me alongside graphs showing the extent…

> Even your straw man version of this argument is pretty convincing to me... Wouldn't that make it not a straw man argument? It isn't an argument as pointing out an assumption that voting or committee can be better at allocating resources than a free market. It isn't a very well grounded one and it looks wrong when presented on its own but there isn't much I can do about that. It is popular and people find it convinc…

>> Even your straw man version of this argument is pretty convincing to me...

> Wouldn't that make it not a straw man argument?

I think the "even" and "..." are doing a lot of work in my sentence. You presented a less strong version of the argument than that given by people who support it, thus it is a straw man, period.

> an assumption that voting or committee can be better at allocating resources than a free market

Would you say we had a free market in the 1970s, when the chart I linked showed the top .01% by wealth's share of taxes exceeded their share of wealth? That's essentially what I'd like to go back to, perhaps by a wealth tax. I would say we had a free market then, showing progressive taxation and free markets are absolutely compatible. This isn't Soviet-style central planning.

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

#164

Post by triceratops »

gunapologist99 wrote: post #151
triceratops wrote: post #141

Earlier quoted context omitted.

For the general case: Redeem all stock collected as tax for ETF shares that track broad-market indices. ETFs almost always yield dividends. Toss whatever remains into a black box that no one is allowed to look at. When the government needs some revenue, pick something at random and sell it. It can also sell some ETF shares. The best part is this works for private companies too. If you work at a startup and get option…

> .... windfall Odd that you refer to your efforts in a startup as delivering a windfall, as if you didn't earn/expect it, as if it's a lottery ticket. Should we tax lottery earnings? Sure, why not, since we tax everything else. But a startup is not a lottery ticket, and we are harming it, at least indirectly and likely directly, by taxing it before it even exists. Even just the paperwork to handle all of this is nee…

Startup stock options are effectively a lottery ticket. Most startup options end up being worth $0 no matter how hard you labor. Your efforts may merit more than that, but to actually expect more is naivete.

If you want real $$ work at a public company.

You're correct that taxing exercised options at a private company is harmful. It happens today. I'm suggesting a fairer alternative.

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

#165

Post by scottlamb »

AnthonyMouse wrote: post #157
scottlamb wrote: post #103

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> Is that assuming the tax money is going into the void? It assumes that it's going somewhere else, which, if it wasn't, would cause it to have no purpose or effect. > shouldn't someone be getting the money and potentially using it to buy Apple stock? Going from "predominantly what happens" to "it's theoretically possible occasionally" is a question of magnitude rather than direction. > Most of them may waste it on s…

> Going from "predominantly what happens" to "it's theoretically possible occasionally" is a question of magnitude rather than direction.

Okay, fair enough. I took "without adding any new buyers" literally but yes, I can imagine this creating some downward pressure on stock prices.

> Or their spending it on food and rent results in an increase in rents, even for the people who didn't get any, which rents go in part to foreign investors who remove it from the jurisdiction, and then domestic people have even less to invest than before. ... Compare this to the thing where you e.g. relax zoning rules to reduce housing scarcity so that rents come down and then domestic people have that money to invest.

Are these mutually exclusive? I concede that people being unable to afford rent limits rent to some extent, but it's not my preferred price control. Giving them more money that they could use on rent might make it more clear we need to make other changes, and I can live with that.

> you've now created a preference for spending rather than saving/investing while increasing your reliance on the taxation of saving/investing.

Yes. Is that worse than the status quo? There's a lot of spending now that should be happening and is not—people literally dying from inability to afford medical treatment. You'll probably say—just as with the rent example—that people being more able to pay will cause medical costs to increase further, and I agree that should be addressed, but again I think people being flat-out unable to afford it is not the best way to control medical spending.

> [...pointless wars are a massive overall net loss...]

I think you understand this, but just to be clear in case anyone was wondering: I also hate pointless wars, just was making the point that even in the stupidest use of the tax money I can imagine there's still someone getting money to buy Apple stock, even though as a whole we're worse off.

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

#166

Post by Animats »

Balgair wrote: post #148
Animats wrote: post #90

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...

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

Mercury used in some kind of electrolysis process for extracting lithium from something, apparently. Has to do with tritium production.

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

#167

Post by jjk166 »

ortusdux wrote: post #146
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.

Unless I'm missing something, footnote #20 at the end of the 43 page report significantly undercuts their argument. It is easy to make a clear and succinct report that comes to the conclusion you want.

I don't see how it undercuts their argument. At best it means the DOE was following the spirit of their standards and the mission need statement was simply created later in the process than it should have been. It's still questionable though whether that prior planning actually considered and evaluated options as open-mindedly as if it had been done by the appropriate process.

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

#168

Post by jjk166 »

chris_va wrote: post #135
bruckie wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's about what I would expect from an organization named Government Accountability Office: hold the government accountable to its written guidelines (or at least report on how well it's doing at meeting them).

Yeah. I don't think the conclusion is necessarily wrong or that they shouldn't have investigated, but I also think the cost to the taxpayers might increase due to the underlying nuance. The report implies that the guidelines are correct, but doesn't really quantify the counterfactual. Again, devil's advocate

It is not the Auditor's job to determine that the rules are optimal, it is only to determine whether they are being followed. Presumably when the rule was instated someone had good reason to believe it would be beneficial; and if someone makes a compelling argument that following the rule is not beneficial, it should be repealed, not ignored.

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

#169

Post by zer00eyz »

chickenbig wrote: post #139
fc417fc802 wrote: post #18

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> 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_...

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

#170

Post by roenxi »

scottlamb wrote: post #163
roenxi wrote: post #160

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Even your straw man version of this argument is pretty convincing to me... Wouldn't that make it not a straw man argument? It isn't an argument as pointing out an assumption that voting or committee can be better at allocating resources than a free market. It isn't a very well grounded one and it looks wrong when presented on its own but there isn't much I can do about that. It is popular and people find it convinc…

>> Even your straw man version of this argument is pretty convincing to me... > Wouldn't that make it not a straw man argument? I think the "even" and "..." are doing a lot of work in my sentence. You presented a less strong version of the argument than that given by people who support it, thus it is a straw man, period. > an assumption that voting or committee can be better at allocating resources than a free market…

I'm still a bit lost on what the point of difference is. You seem to be saying that you've seen evidence that makes this "strawman argument" convincing to you, but you don't seem to accept that I've generally argued with people who believe it. If you think there is evidence and it is convincing evidence then the obvious interpretation of what I said seems to be that I'm just being logical and straightforward. I don't see the strawman.

I mean I might not know what a strawman is, but I thought it was claiming people were making an argument that in fact they were not.

> Would you say we had a free market in the 1970s, when the chart I linked showed the top .01% by wealth's share of taxes exceeded their share of wealth? That's essentially what I'd like to go back to, perhaps by a wealth tax. I would say we had a free market then, showing progressive taxation and free markets are absolutely compatible. This isn't Soviet-style central planning.

I mean, sure. I've long argued that the US strategy of printing money and giving it to asset owners is bad. I doubt a wealth tax would help, IMO the real issue is the welfare for wealthy people. Seems kinda dumb and the people claiming that the economy would collapse without it appear to be making up their principles as they go along. But we should all want to encourage wealth. It makes people wealthy.

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