Nuclear power, risk, and the tools for thinking about them.
Projects and writing by Erick Ball: a reactor simulator you can build in, abridged versions of long reads, and essays on how safe is safe enough.
Projects
Meltdown
A nuclear power plant simulator sandbox. Lay out vessels, pumps, pipes and turbines, then run the thermal-hydraulics on PWRs, BWRs, advanced designs, or whatever strange reactor you come up with. Atom Jack, your EPC contractor, is on call in the corner.
Launch the simulator →Abridged reading
Don't Worry About the Vase, abridged
Zvi Mowshowitz's long AI roundups, cut down to the parts worth your time, with images described inline.
SemiAnalysis, de-jargoned
Digests of SemiAnalysis research on chips, datacenters and AI infrastructure, rewritten for readers outside the industry.
Abridgments are machine-generated with Claude and link back to the originals. Read and subscribe to the authors directly: thezvi.substack.com, semianalysis.com.
Writing
Book Review: Safe Enough? A History of Nuclear Power and Accident Risk
How the nuclear industry moved fast, broke itself, and kept trying to climb back out through probabilistic risk assessment.
A prompt for clearer Claude writing
A system prompt that stops Claude Opus 5 from inventing jargon and arguing with mistakes you never made, and how it beat Orwell's rules and Simplified Technical English in testing.
More on LessWrong.