Operation Gigawatt proposes deployment of up to 13 Holtec SMR-300 pressurized water reactors across Utah and Wyoming, with the first dual-unit site at Brigham City on the Great Salt Lake basin and the Wasatch Fault. No thermodynamic analysis of waste heat in an endorheic basin has been performed by any operator, agency, or regulatory body prior to this publication. This paper presents that analysis. Using the ANS/ANS-5.1-2014 decay heat standard, the NGA-West2 ground motion prediction equations, and first-principles thermodynamic accounting via the latent heat of vaporization, we calculate that the 13-reactor fleet continuously rejects 8.97 gigawatts of waste heat, evaporating 101,543 acre-feet per year from a terminal basin with no thermal exit pathway, consuming 49 percent of the Great Salt Lake's current volume over one operating license.Post-shutdown decay heat requires active water cooling for 24,110 years, the first half-life of plutonium-239, during which the Wasatch Fault Brigham City segment produces a M 6.75 or greater seismic event with mathematical certainty, and 14 of 50 instrumentation and control materials are projected to reach global supply exhaustion before the first operating license expires. South arm salinity crosses the brine shrimp reproductive failure threshold within the first decade of fleet operation, eliminating 40 to 50 percent of the global aquaculture feed supply. Lake-effect precipitation declines by 20 percent, reducing snowpack at Olympic venues by 90 inches by 2034. The proximate cause of the energy demand driving this deployment is a thermodynamic specification omission in the 1964 IBM byte standard, which excluded Landauer's minimum energy relationship despite its publication at IBM three years earlier. No party named in the liability section performed this analysis before authorizing, funding, or deploying reactors in Utah. The Great Salt Lake is not a suitable site for thermodynamic nuclear deployment.
January Walker (2026) studied this question.