Show HN: Reactor Atlas

Hi HN, I'm a nuclear engineer and tech entrepreneur. After working for 3 years in the National Atomic Energy Commision (CNEA) in HPC software for nuclear simulations, I co-founded ratherlabs.com, a software company providing blockchain solutions for startups. Rather Labs business reached ~6 million usd in annual revenue in 2024; now demand is decreasing as our niche clients are using AI to launch their MVPs.

Now I'm joining my scientific background with my entrepreneurial inclinations to think of problems related to the energy industry. Nuclear is experiencing a renaissance now (it was in a dark age when I was studying after the Fukushima event) so I think this is the right moment for me to jump again into the field.

Reactor atlas is an interactive nuclear reactor map and an intelligence layer on top of it. The basic layer indexes:

  - power reactors
  - research reactors
  - fuel facilities

with their history and projection, by country. The project is solving a fragmented information ecosystem, where operational and commercial data is hard to conciliate. Also, I'm monitoring nuclear news associated with each of the facilities, political declarations that may affect the nuclear landscape and geo-phisical news (like earthquakes) that could affect operation. On top of the operational + news layer, I'm creating an intelligence layer that will help institutions of different types make faster decisions by subscribing to very specific alerts.

As an engineer, I used to code in fortran and c++ when I was working at CNEA, and later I participated in the first Rather Labs projects architecting complex async systems, mostly using MERN stack. I'm no longer coding anymore. I'm focused on designing robust systems with AI agents.

I mainly used Claude Fable 5.1 to develop reactoratlas.com, deploying on vercel and using mostly nextjs, threejs, postgreSQL and some cron jobs to query and update data. I miss coding as in the old days, but I haven't code a single line in this project. And I strongly believe we humans shouldn't code anymore: our responsibility is now on designing and supervising AI systems.

Thanks for your attention!

Show HN: Reactor Atlas
reactoratlas.com

Cool project! However, the map-globe navigation feels confusing and unintuitive compared to a more conventional 2D map UI. Also the clustering algorithm makes labels “jump” in a jarring way during zooming. I’d tune it somehow so that it feels better to the users.

Sure! not a translation bug! The monitoring section you mention is part of the “signals” layer, where I’m tracking things like increases/decreases in power generation and grid contributions. I think this kind of data could be useful for operators and institutions. The Monitoring/News section, on the other hand, is 99% nuclear.

And yeah, fair point on the coding comment. I guess I still enjoy it too much! I’ll publish some piece of code fully coded by my own fingers one of these days

Nice site, looks like you had a bit of fun putting it together.

Missing the Australian research reactor OPAL in Lucas Heights, Sydney - https://www.ansto.gov.au/education/nuclear-facts

Note that while you do have the no longer operating Fukushima Daiichi plant, you don't have the ceased functioning easter egg natural nuclear fission reactors, such as the one in Oklo, Gabon.

It seems related to address nuclear waste also - the filthy sites related to early nuclear weapons development, the surface blast sites during the testing years, current and proposed repository locations, various open pools of low level radioactive waste from mining, rare earth processing, etc.

And, if you're going "full stack" - nuclear sources - Olympic Dam (sitting tight with large reserves), former African sites, Kazakhstan supplying the US and elsewhere, automated uranium mining in Canada, etc.

Sure, and they should all be part of an Atlas that purports to map research reactors.

Moreover, the entire continent of Australia currently lacks any pins .. so it'd be nice to get one there for Lucas .. if not for for one of the globe's largest uranium reserves and maybe for that place where the British dusted a future UK Prime Minister with fallout.