Paper

A conservationist view of nuclear waste Spent nuclear fuel is a potentially valuable source of electricity, power for deep space probes and pacemakers, and uniquely effective, cancer killing drugs. After a few hundred years, it is no more dangerous than any other highly toxic poison. Only a sinfully wasteful society would treat such a bountiful ore as a disposable nuisance

In a recent Bulletin of Atomic Scientists article, M. V. Ramana has questioned the viability of molten salt reactors. This note is the Gordian Knot Group’s response.

This document describes the GKG (Gordian Knot Group) Grid Model. It is not a user’s manual. Rather it attempts to outline the model’s assumptions and limitations, and serve as a reference to which the GKG analyses based on this model can refer to avoid repeating this description in each of those studies.

This study of an “all nuclear” grid for Germany is a follow-on to our earlier study of a German all wind/solar grid called Green Hydrogen and Dunkelflauten.

The Strange Journey of the Conservation Movement

On March 28th, 1979, the nearly new Unit 2 at the Three Mile Island nuclear plant in Pennsylvania suffered a meltdown. This was an exceedingly expensive industrial casualty. The plant was a multi-billion dollar write off. The nuclear establishment did much finger pointing, soul searching, and hand wringing. Two major semi-independent reports were published: the Kemeny Report and the Rogovin Report. They claimed to have learned a number of important lessons. This note compares the lessons they should have been learned, with the lessons that were learned. In writing this piece, I had essential help from Mike Derivan, one of

There had been an immense amount of hype, and considerable nonsense written about Small Modular Reactors. When you are trying to solve a problem as big as the Gordian knot, the closely coupled issues of electricity poverty and planet heating, small is not beautiful. There are strong economies of scale in nuclear power generation. Any solution that does not recognize this will be hopelessly wasteful. But it is also true that we must take advantage of the order of magnitude improvement in productivity and quality associated with assembly line manufacture, as compared to conventional on site construction. What we need

Until recently proponents of all RE grid have argued that a combination of hydro and batteries could turn unreliable power into reliable. But this solution has proven limited at best and transparently silly at worst. It does not scale planet wide. The new solution to intermittency is green hydrogen. Hydrogen is produced from wind and solar electricity by splitting water with electrolysis. When the wind does not blow nor the sun shine, the hydrogen is converted back to electricity, by burning it in a gas turbine.T his piece examines how this solution fares in the context of Germany.

This note argues that deep geologic repositories for used nuclear fuel are monumental exercises in hubris.

Extract from Creating the New World; stories and images from the dawn of the atomic age, by Theodore Rockwell, 2002, 2003, 1st Books Library, Bloomington Indiana, pp 150 – 176