Firefly Reading Circle

The Firefly Reading Circle is ongoing. Register for the next session on Luma and join us in Bengaluru for a hands-on deep-dive into advanced nuclear systems.

Register on Luma

Our inaugural session took place on 20 June 2026 in Bengaluru, India. We opened with Nuclear Engineering Fundamentals.

Read the session recap on X for highlights from the day.

A monthly technical reading circle for engineers, researchers, students, and builders interested in advanced nuclear energy, reactor design, systems engineering, and deep-tech innovation. We read closely, discuss rigorously, and put theory into practice through hands-on workshops.

Evolve from a reading group into a study group and, ultimately, an open-source simulation community focused on advanced nuclear systems. Each cohort builds shared knowledge and reusable tools that move the wider Firefly mission forward.

Each session runs for two hours and is structured in three parts:

1. Technical Overview — 30 minA focused walkthrough of the month's reading and core concepts.
2. Guided Discussion — 60 minStructured discussion of the material, open questions, and implications.
3. Hands-on Workshop — 30 minPractical exercises that apply the concepts using real tooling.

Each session produces shared notes, technical summaries, simulation exercises, and research questions for the community.

The founding series runs across six months, building from fundamentals to a community-selected reactor architecture. The circle doesn't start with an answer — the design we pursue is the output of the series.

1. 001 — The Reactor June / CompletedBlackboard fundamentals: criticality, heat evacuation, radiation containment, and the full system from core to turbine. Notes available.
2. 002 — Architectures Through the Fuel AugustReading: WNA fuel cycle overview + Bhabha's 1958 paper. Workshop: map the reactor design space — why PWR vs PHWR vs FBR vs MSR is fundamentally a fuel-cycle choice.
3. 003 — Fast Reactors & Breeding SeptemberReading: ORNL MSR reports + Generation IV Roadmap. Workshop: live thermal vs fast comparison in OpenMC, and the PFBR Kalpakkam story — a 68-year bet reaching criticality this year.
4. 004 — The Back End OctoberReading: spent fuel and reprocessing primers. Workshop: the 100,000-year problem — decay heat, reprocessing, deep geological disposal — and drafting the criteria that should decide a reactor design.
5. 005 — The Design Space NovemberReading: Generation IV system summaries. Workshop: breakout teams each champion one reactor family and build a shared comparison matrix — our first open community artifact on GitHub.
6. 006 — The Selection DecemberWorkshop: teams present tradeoff cases against the group's own criteria. Output: Firefly Design Rationale v0 — a public record of what we'll build and why, published open source.

Across the series we work with an open, industry-relevant toolchain:

• T.01OpenMC
• T.02OpenFOAM
• T.03Python
• T.04Jupyter
• T.05FreeCAD
• T.06GitHub
• T.07Systems Modeling

The circle is open to anyone curious about advanced nuclear systems, including:

• W.01Mechanical Engineers
• W.02Chemical Engineers
• W.03Materials Engineers
• W.04Electrical Engineers
• W.05Software Engineers
• W.06Physicists
• W.07Researchers
• W.08Students
• W.09Deep-Tech Builders

Register on Luma Indicate Interest Back to Project Firefly