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Comment by aiyodev | Hacker News Reader

Gates is worth ~$100B. The US federal budget is ~$4.1T per year.

This is like asking someone with a 4 Gbps connection to transfer some files and offering to burn a single mini CD to help them.

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Why are you comparing something as specific as advanced nuclear power tech to the whole federal budget? 2 billion dollars is nothing to sneeze at. (not even considering the fact that Gates has been working on this since 2006, so there's considerable work that has been done)

The budget of the office of nuclear energy is about $1B [1]. So if Gates spends an extra billion over say, the next 10 years, that's still a 10% budget boost. Not jaw dropping but still significant.

[1] https://www.energy.gov/ne/our-budget

A billion here a billion there and pretty soon you’re talking real money.

To give you a data point, current shutdown that just ended was a fight about 5 billions. Budget is big - even discretionary one - which is only one that needs to be considered when we talk about spending priorities, since non-discretionary one is pretty much fixed - but it also has a lot of items inside. And if we talk about priorities for specific items, 100bn is nothing to sneeze at. Whole Department of Energy budget is is about 30bn - so it's definitely on the same scale.

The shutdown wasn’t about the money so much as what it represented.

> The US federal budget is ~$4.1T per year.

What is the current US federal budget for building or supporting nuclear energy infrastructure?

https://www.energy.gov/ne/articles/6-things-know-about-nucle...

$30.6 billion requested in 2019 for the Department of Energy, which includes more than $757 million for the Office of Nuclear Energy (NE).

Last week the Federal budget was "object not set to an instance of a budget".

What's the federal budge that gets reserved for next generation power infrastructure development?

I would rather say it's like helping someone with an already

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