Nuclear engineer / Founder / CEO @ Rather Labs

Field notes on
systems that
must not fail.

Nuclear engineering taught me how systems behave when failure is not an option. These are the notes I keep while applying that to companies, products, and AI.

008 entriesSeries / AllQuery / none

Latest entry09 SEPT 20265 min

How Does a Water-Cooled SMR Work? An Interactive Diagram

Follow the heat from nuclear fuel to electricity in a water-cooled SMR. Explore the primary loop, steam generator, turbine and condenser in an interactive diagram.

Nuclear
Engineering

Read the entry

Vintage scientific illustration of a water-cooled SMR, with an internal primary circuit transferring heat to a separate steam circuit, turbine-generator and condenser. — PLATE 01 / N-8730Nuclear

Vintage scientific illustration of a closed natural-circulation loop, with heat entering low, hotter water rising and cooler water returning from an elevated heat exchanger.

09 SEPT 20266 min

Natural Circulation in SMRs: What Drives the Flow?

How can an SMR circulate coolant without a primary pump? Explore buoyancy, height and flow resistance with an interactive natural-circulation model.

Nuclear
Engineering

Bauhaus scientific illustration of neutron activity, heated fuel rods and coolant flow, joined by a two-way loop representing power transfer and temperature feedback.

09 SEPT 202611 min

Neutronics–Thermal-Hydraulics Coupling: An SMR Example

Explore neutronics–thermal-hydraulics coupling in a water-cooled SMR with an interactive core diagram and a Picard–Newton comparison.

Nuclear
Engineering

Bauhaus archival illustration of independent nuclear records linked to a shared plant identity, with distinct trails preserving each source.

07 SEPT 202611 min

Nobody Owns the Joins: Nuclear Data and Why We Built Reactor Atlas

Every authoritative nuclear dataset measures something slightly different, at a different date, under a different definition. Reactor Atlas keeps every reading, publishes the rule that picks the headline figure, and checks the result against what regulators and grid operators publish.

Nuclear
Engineering

Vintage nuclear atlas with a central globe, facility markers and layered historical globes above a timeline of reactor sites.

04 SEPT 20264 min

Reactor Atlas: A Nuclear Facility Map of Earth, Across Time

Reactor Atlas is a nuclear facility map of every power and research reactor on Earth, plus the fuel cycle. Scrub history, compare nuclear reactors by country, and follow nuclear news, signals and alerts.

Nuclear
Engineering
AI systems

Atomic-age scientific plate showing a fuel-pellet temperature cross-section, reactor core and connected physical models.

02 SEPT 202613 min

Criticality: The Physical and Numerical Models

A pressurised water reactor that runs in a browser tab. The physics it solves, the integrator each part gets and why, how the parts are coupled, what the model is for, and where it stops.

Nuclear
Engineering

Bauhaus cybernetics illustration of continuous workflow loops around protected shared context, with a gate for human decisions.

31 AUG 202611 min

AI-Native Is Not a Chatbot. It Is a Graph That Never Sleeps.

Buying seats for a chat assistant does not make a company AI-native. It takes loops that run around the clock, engineering graphs with humans only at the expensive gates, and a context layer defended the way a containment is. And it changes what the people are there for.

AI systems
Leadership
Entrepreneurship

Vintage simulation instrument combining a cutaway nuclear power station, analog controls and a trace of plant response.

29 AUG 20263 min

I Built a Nuclear Power Plant Simulator That Runs in Your Browser

Xenon-135 peaks about nine hours after you shut a reactor down, and until it decays a restart is physically impossible. Criticality is a full 4-loop PWR running at 60 fps in your browser, so you can watch that happen instead of reading it off a whiteboard.