Here's some possible ways to interpret what you're doing:
1. False equivalence as a defence against uncomfortable distinctions
2. Mistaking nuance for the rejection of categories
3. Performative independence
4. Beating a retreat from empirical claims into abstract generalities
5. Playing out some weird psychological desire to maintain a symmetrical view of politics
6. Confusing party identification with political classification

Whatever it is, it's ineffectual. How does the fact that party platforms are compromises tell us anything about where those compromises fall on the political spectrum? You're just pointlessly eliding the difference between the complexity of individual political beliefs and the existence of meaningful differences between political ideologies.

From the CBO link: “Discretionary programs account for the remaining 29 percent of the projected dollar value of loans and loan guarantees in 2026. The largest discretionary programs are the mortgage programs administered by the Federal Housing Administration (FHA), which is part of HUD, and the Department of Agriculture’s Rural Housing Service (RHS); the small-business loans provided by the Small Business Administration (SBA); and the ***Department of Energy’s Title 17 loans for innovative technologies***.”

I have put three stars on either side of the pertinent phrase. Perhaps you were confused by the phrase Department of Energy and didn’t realise this was the DOE? Or perhaps you’re just shit at reading? Only you know. In any event, the CBO estimates that DOE's Title 17 direct-loan programme carries substantial economic subsidy costs when market risk is included. Its projected fair-value cost for 2026 lending is $8.1bn. This directly challenges your (stupid and wrong) argument that interest payments necessarily constitute taxpayer profit.

The GAO document found deficiencies in loan-review guidance, documentation and training that raised questions about whether DOE was consistently evaluating applications accurately and in accordance with the law, ie DOE’s financial controls for the programme are insufficient.

The energy.gov link is to an internal audit which found that the Loan Programs Office lacked an effective framework for managing conflicts of interest among contractors helping evaluate loan application.

Saying it’s a nothinburger that conflicts of interest may arise because such risks always exist is idiotic. It’s like saying that safety risks from failure to control infections always exist *and therefore there’s no point in controlling them*. The issue isn’t that the risks exist. It’s that the risks aren’t being mitigated effectively.

Wow, that I didn’t know! I’m not surprised though. The thing that is galling about it, is that the effort and money being put into all this theoretical stuff could instead be used to build out actual deployments of renewables, which ciould be up and running much faster. When you run the numbers on LCOE and include O&M and decomm, it’s clear that would deliver more energy for the same amount of cash.

That's the theory, but it's not the practice. They are taking just as long as large reactors. In some senses longer, because none has actually been put into commercial operation, whereas new large reactors have come online. And they turn out to have very little actual modularity and scalability, because there's more than 150 designs out there, so no-one is winning enough of the market for repeatable learnings, and anyway, you'll never get to volume manufacturing for the parts involved, because the quantities are just too small, and everything still requires literal nuclear-grade engineering.

Take a motor-operated isolator valve that you'd find in a cooling system. You find plenty of these outside SMR applications, often 4 to 6 inch sizes, and they might cost something like 3 to 10k USD in a typical demanding industrial application. But they will cost more like 30 to 100k USD in an SMR, because they need to be made from nuclear-grade materials with documented material traceability, need seismic qualification, need nuclear-specific quality assurance, inspection and documentation, and need highly secure supply chains (no-one wants a counterfeit component showing up in a nuclear safety system). And they won't get much cheaper, because of strict configuration control, which limits the extent of any changes to components, materials and manufacturing processes.

It's also important to recognise that the economies of learning that apply afe fundamentally different and more limited for construction projects, which is what every SMR is, than for component manufacturing. That reflects the facts that (1) different places have different ground conditions, seismic risk, regulatory requirements, humidity, water access, etc, etc, and (2) huge amounts of stuff still have to be constructed on site by humans (even if assisted by machines), compared with a factory line that can be automated. This is still a problem even for solar, where the panels themselves can be cheap compared to the install costs, which is why there are various attempts being made to turn more of the deployment into a manufactured process rather than a construction process. Eg https://5b.co/en/5b-maverick

Of course it's an unreasonable request. It's a request being made of a federal agency that is forbidden from getting involved in elections.

How can you fail to have noticed this very basic point?

Their incompetence will save us from some of the effects of their malice, but will make other effects worse.

I always think it's funny when they talk about the extreme left. As if any Democrat is arguing for anything remotely like a program of nationalisation of the means of production. These people are such complete ignoramuses. They have no *concept* of what actual hard left politics argues for. And they will have absolutely no problem themselves arguing that the government should cut oil exports, lower the price of gas, etc -- overtly socialist moves. They're profoundly stupid and ignorant.

But once again: no SMRs are in commercial operation in the US. Large reactors have been built. I'm not banging the drum for large reactors, I'm pointing out that every single SMR remains vapourware at this stage. There's a good episode on this from Matt Ferrell ("Undecided").

Except that large plants actually exist and SMRs don't...

That was very well done, kudos!

This is overstated. According to X-energy’s regulatory disclosures, the Xe-100 has four main operator-controlled variables: control rod position, He circulator operation, feedwater pump operation, and turbine throttle valve position. It's more automated than older plants, but not completely automated, and older plants are also quite automated. It does use more passive safety features, though. And of course, it's not actually been built yet, so it's all theoretical at this stage.

It’s implicit in “Presuming that loan is repaid, the taxpayer should actually make some money back on the investment.”

You could have said “Presuming that loan operates in the way that other loans offered by the Trump administration to energy companies have operated, the taxpayer is likely to do poorly”, for example. You chose to highlight a possible positive outcome, one of many possible outcomes and quite plausibly not the most likely.

Documented shortcomings of the loans:
https://www.gao.gov/products/g...
https://www.cbo.gov/publicatio...
https://www.energy.gov/ig/arti...

Yes. And of course, a steam generator for a nuclear power plant is orders of magnitude harder to build and maintain than an “ordinary” steam generator.

Why would you give this the benefit of the doubt? I can think of two reasons: malice, ie we should not give you the benefit of the doubt ie you’re doing this to push a narrative you know to be bullshit, or incompetence, ie it has not occurred to you to check the details of the loans. Hint: the interest being charged bears absolutely no resemblance to a commercial loan. The taxpayer is losing money even if the loan is repaid in full with interest. The CBO calculates the economic subsidy costs for these loans. It’s above 12% when accounting for market risk.

On top of that, Palisades is also getting explicit subsidies as well as the loans, and the others may well get them in the future, too. $650m, to be exact, which is a shit ton more than any interest payments. Now, that will actually lower prices for co-op customers for a while, including domestic customers. But OTOH, Wolverine could have given that money in the form of grants to customers for solar or solar+BESS or insulation, and that would have cut customers’ costs permanently, whereas with this grant money, once it’s gone, it’s gone, and then the power plant can just jack up their charges and get it all back in future years.

Maybe, just maybe, that’s because solar and wind are *system level assets*, not *single site level assets*, whereas diesel gennies are just site-level emergency backups. It’s hilarious you quote Elsham, given that it’ll be using up to 1GW of power and only 50MW will come from on-site gas. So it’ll be way more reliant on grid-supplied electricity than its own gas, and in the UK, that means it’s going to use a shit-ton more renewable electricity than on-site gas, the exact opposite of what you think is going on. And the UK has a shit ton of big companies with PPAs in place for renewables, but they don’t build all of this onsite, because that would be idiotic, and Tesco and Google and the others are not idiotic.

Heterogeneity is literally the point of a national system design, because it delivers the cheapest and most reliable possible power, and avoids single points of failure.