The Gordon–Kim electron gas model is used to derive a set of short range repulsive potentials for homoatomic pairs containing atoms up to Kr. These potentials correlate extremely well with experimental van der Waals and nonbonded radii. Single exponential fits to the repulsive potentials are given, and are combined with an approximate dispersion energy term derived from experimental and theoretical atomic dipole polarizabilities and C6 constants to form a set of internally consistent atom–atom potentials of the exp-6 form.