Paper

The Gordian Knot Group is not in the climate modelling business. But we are supposed to be solving the Gordian Knot, half of which is global warming. It behooves us to understand the latter. This paper investigates how well the climate models have done in replicating planet heating to date. Based on that performance, the average of the model temperature projections in any given emissions scenarios is probably 40% too high.

The conflicting roles of Big Oil and the Rockefeller Foundation in the early days of nuclear power.

This notes asks the question: why don’t we regulate nuclear power the way we regulate coal?

Despite what many nukies try to claim. nuclear power and wind/solar do not play nice together. This piece explains why. But for more importantly, it makes the point that, unless nuclear power is truly cheap, as cheap as it can be, it will make a dent in neither energy poverty nor global warming.

Sigmoid No Threshold (SNT) or any model of radiation harm that recognizes the importance of our repair systems and the fact that those systems can be overwhelmed if the dose rate is high enough cannot use the ICRP/NCRP procedure for estimating the harm due to ingesting radioactive material. The ICRP simply accumulates the dose over the entire time that an isotope is in the body, which usually is many repair periods. Dose rate is irrelevant. This paper uses SNT to estimate the harm associated with ingesting contaminated food after a release. It gets pretty deep into the weeds. The paper

It’s easy to criticize the current nuclear regulatory system. But we need a replacement. What should it look like? Here’s my proposal.

I don’t expect to make it to 90. So I had to write this history a little prematurely. It tells the sad tale of how another opportunity to use nuclear power to solve the Gordian knot foundered on the Two Lies reef. jack

In Part 1, we found we probably have the better part of a century to react to global warming. In Part 2, we discovered the enormity of attempting to replace fossil fuel. If we screw this up, we could kill billions and rip civilization to shreads in the process. We also found that the current plan based on wind and solar has been and will continue to be a massive failure. So what should we do? This paper argues that the answer is nuclear power. But it must be truly cheap nuclear. Expensive nuclear is no where good enough. Thanks

This paper is based on the latest iteration of the Gordian Knot Group’s electrical grid model. The potential primary sources are wind, solar, nuclear, gas and coal. At user option, the model implements both battery and hydrogen storage. The model minimizes the sum of the grid cost and the social cost of CO2 at a user supplied CO2 price. In this paper the model has been exercised on Germany for a range of CO2 prices and nuclear costs. The results demonstrate the overwhelming importance of the cost of nuclear to the combinations of grid cost and CO2 emissions that are

One common and plausible argument against nuclear power is that it is too slow. The evidence offered is recent interminable builds in the US and Europe. But is this inherent in the technology? This post examines the American, French, and Japanese record. It turns out that there is no technical reason why a nuclear plant should require any more time than a coal plant to build. On the other hand, the whole learning curve concept for power plants appears to over-rated. Those who are betting on the learning curve to markedly reduce current exorbitant nuclear costs and endless build times,