from Hacker News

Doge seeks to cancel lease on nuclear waste storage facility

by contemporary343 on 3/5/25, 5:41 PM with 23 comments

• by verzali on 3/5/25, 6:28 PM

  Why is the government leasing nuclear waste storage? Who would offer a lease that lets you dump nuclear waste on your land? Surely this is the kind of thing you buy land for, not rent it.

• by amelius on 3/5/25, 6:23 PM

  It becomes clearer every day how the Fermi paradox should be resolved.

• by WarOnPrivacy on 3/5/25, 6:30 PM

  The NOTUS article that (I think) first reported on this-> https://archive.ph/lcoYN

• by quantified on 3/5/25, 6:55 PM

  Strategy might be:

  1) Break everything

  2) Fix things that people complain enough about.

  Everything else wasn't sufficiently important, for some definition of sufficient.

• by sapphicsnail on 3/5/25, 6:44 PM

  Wikipedia article about WIPP, the storage facility overseen by the group that might be axed. I'm not sure if the lease being cancelled is for the office of the team monitoring the site or if it includes the actual storage facility as well.

  https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Waste_Isolation_Pilot_Plant

• by watwut on 3/5/25, 6:48 PM

  Flagged, interesting which stories gets flaged

• by MaxfordAndSons on 3/5/25, 6:19 PM

  Smart. Could definitely find a more efficient private operator to handle this. I've heard good things about one Charles Montgomery Burns out of Springfield, he'd be just the man to do this important work.

• by r0ckarong on 3/5/25, 6:26 PM

  And then just dump it in the national parks. Nobody there to complain anymore.

• by onecommentman on 3/6/25, 4:52 AM

  That would be one interesting storage unit auction if it was WIPP.

• by spants on 3/5/25, 6:40 PM

  Do you think that the expenditure was not correctly described on the system, hence the "cancellation"?

• by MrMcCall on 3/5/25, 6:22 PM

  "Some people just want to watch the world burn." --Bale's Batman's Alfred

  I suppose most of them probably don't even know they're evil.

  Of course, Alfred's story was about an Indian man sabotaging the British Empire's operation, so -- now that I think about it -- the guy was probably just interested in watching the BE burn, so the analogy is not so clear cut, in either direction.

  Anyway, you get my point.

  We're supposed to be drug tested to get a software engineering job, but that idiot can be on adderall and ketamine and God-knows-what-else?

  Remember, those wicked Germans of the 1930s and 40s were pretty big on meth, and their dear leader liked to speedball it with morphine.

  Red flags should be flying, y'all!

• by killerteddybear on 3/5/25, 6:23 PM

  Oh, awesome, that sounds super safe and responsible. I'm a huge fan of nuclear power but this type of shit is how you kill support for it.

• by gunian on 3/5/25, 6:17 PM

  launch it into space like in futurama

• by torlok on 3/5/25, 6:17 PM

  Whatever this hose of bullshit strategy is, it's probably working because I'm already tired of venting through mocking comments.

• by ChrisArchitect on 3/5/25, 7:20 PM

  Related update earlier:

  Trump Agency Pulls 443 Sites Off Market in Real Estate Reversal

  https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43268814

• by usdrthsdfdg on 3/5/25, 6:13 PM

  aaaand we're here

  This is my biggest concern. When jackass Rick Perry said years ago he wanted to eliminate the Department of Energy, I expected this would be a talking point republicans would stick to. Because it got their voters excited. The uneducated hear "Department of Energy" and they think "these people are make my gas and electricity more expensive". When their actual job is safeguarding nuclear weapons. This might just be more grandstanding, but it's not good.