What actually causes nuclear accidents?

Not missing systems.
Not lack of data.
Not a single failure.

But connections.

In *Nuke Engineer Rants*, nuclear safety expert Riku Mattila cuts through the language of checklists and models to examine how real systems behave under stress—when assumptions break, dependencies surface, and “independent” layers begin to fail together.

Across short, focused chapters, he explores:

* Why “fail-safe” design can disable the only working system
* How defense-in-depth quietly erodes under real conditions
* Where probabilistic risk assessment works—and where it doesn’t
* Why incident reports make complex failures look deceptively simple
* How small, tolerable deviations align into serious events

Written with clarity and precision, these essays reflect decades of experience in reactor analysis, safety review, and system design. They are not theoretical. They are grounded in how things actually fail—and why.

This is not a textbook.
It is not a memoir.

It is a way of looking at systems—technical and human—when they matter most.

**For engineers, operators, and anyone interested in how complex systems really behave.**