my car only had semiconductors in the alternator diode bridge
and a distributor-pump diesel
from which i had replaced
the shutoff solenoid
with a wire operated valve
we had four of them
one for me
one for wife
one as repair backup
and one in case there is another breakdown
while one is being repaired
they were not very reliable
with the hydropneumatic suspension
at 180 bar pressure
but they were marvels of engineering
and you had always an excuse
for buying new tools
times change
now im stuck in bed
not under a car
and wife drives an electric mercedes
***
When I was 11, three disasters occurred within a few months: the explosion of Space Shuttle Challenger, the murder of Olof Palme, and the reactivity accident at Chornobyl NPP.
Chornobyl got me interested in reactor physics, Challenger in safety engineering, and Palme got me to keep the heck out of politics.
***
What has stayed with me most from my years at Helsinki University of Technology is not a specific course or method, but a shift in how I relate to problems.
The first lesson was humility. Some aspects of mathematics and physics are not just difficult in a casual sense; they resist intuition, refuse to yield quickly, and expose the limits of what you think you understand. You can do everything “right” and still find yourself stuck, circling the same idea without making progress. Experiencing this frequently removes any illusion of effortless mastery that many of us had when we entered that institution.
The second lesson seems almost contradictory. Despite the challenges, almost any physical problem can be solved. Not necessarily in closed form, not elegantly, and not on the first attempt, but it can be made tractable. You simplify, bound, approximate, choose the right frame, and little by little, the problem gives way.
I remember Theoretical Mechanics as particularly eye-opening in this regard. It did not make things easier; it made them clearer. It revealed the structure underlying what initially appears chaotic and demonstrated how far careful formulation can take you.
However, I learned my actual trade later at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland. That is where theory met consequence, where models had to stand up to reality, and where I learned what matters when something is no longer an exercise but part of a system that must function properly. For example, a direct solution to the dynamic state of a nuclear reactor is still impossible with modern computers, yet those at VTT solved it in the 1970s using a UNIVAC 1108 and a deck of punch cards! I spent seven years there, learning something new each day.
The role of VTT as a school for the entire Finnish nuclear community cannot be overstated. Many people have passed through it at one point or another, carrying with them not just methods, but a certain way of thinking—practical without being careless, and rigorous without being rigid. In that sense, its influence extends far beyond its walls.
Even my current employer, Steady Energy, is not merely influenced by that lineage; it is a direct spin-off from VTT, built on technology and work that originated there, and carried forward by individuals shaped in that same environment. This continuity is not coincidental; it is crucial for sustaining a field like nuclear energy in a country of this size.
For this reason, ensuring that VTT remains properly funded is not a matter of institutional loyalty or nostalgia. It is a practical necessity. Without adequate support, the quiet infrastructure that underpins the entire Finnish nuclear industry—the training ground, the shared reference point, and the place where competence accumulates—begins to erode. If that happens, it becomes difficult to envision a future for the nuclear field in Finland at all.
***
He liked to see how things came apart.
At the age of four, that meant his uncle’s moped—bolts in a tin, cables laid out like veins, the quiet conviction that if something was assembled, it could be understood. Not broken, not ruined. Understood. It was not mischief. It was method, before he knew the word.
Machines stayed with him. Not as objects, but as arguments. Every shaft, every seal, every circuit was a claim about how the world should behave under pressure, heat, time.
At Helsinki University of Technology, he chose plasma physics. It was the cleanest promise—fusion, elegant equations, a future that felt almost moral. But it did not take long to see the shape of that life: long horizons, distant reactors, a career spent approaching something that might always remain just out of reach. There was nothing wrong with it. Only that it would remain, in essence, academic. Nothing to take apart.
So he turned to fission.
It was not an obvious move. That same year, the Finnish parliament had vetoed the country’s fifth nuclear plant. The field felt like a room after the lights had been turned off—still there, but no longer certain of its purpose. Yet the machines were real. The problems were immediate. The consequences did not wait for theory to mature.
In 1997, he arrived at VTT Technical Research Centre of Finland as a trainee and stayed for seven years. It was a good place to learn how reality resists neat formulations. Codes converged—or didn’t. Models held—until they didn’t. Somewhere in that tension, he began to find his footing.
A year later, he joined the Finnish Nuclear Society. In 1998, there was the England excursion: a bus moving through the landscape of an industry, from Sellafield to Capenhurst Nuclear Services to Sizewell B. Places where abstractions became concrete—pipes, buildings, operators, decisions. He met people, listened more than he spoke, and found that networks in this field were not social ornaments but working structures: ways to see further than one’s own desk allowed.
He became active in the Society. Contacts accumulated, but more importantly, so did questions.
Among them: heat.
Not electricity, but heat—district heating, industrial use, the quiet, continuous demand that cities place on energy. He found himself drawn to reactor concepts that did not chase peak power but steady usefulness. The SECURE reactor concept appeared in that landscape, and he wrote about it for the Society’s journal. It was an early hint of a thread that would take years to complete.
In 2004, he moved to the Radiation and Nuclear Safety Authority (STUK) as a reactor physicist, initially to evaluate Olkiluoto 3. It was supposed to be a defined role. But organizations, like machines, reveal their stresses in operation. It became clear that what was needed was not another generalist, but a BWR expert. So he became one.
Outside of work, he built a house with his own hands. It was not separate from the rest of his life. It was the same instinct, scaled differently: understand the loads, choose the materials, accept that mistakes have weight.
In 2008, he became Editor-in-Chief of the Society’s journal. It was a different kind of engineering—shaping arguments instead of steel, but with similar constraints. Clarity mattered. So did honesty.
Around 2010, something began to change. A slight loss of strength in the hands. An inconvenience, at first. Then a pattern.
In 2011, the accident at Fukushima Daiichi nuclear disaster pulled the world’s attention back to boiling water reactors. The expertise he had grown into, almost incidentally, became directly relevant. He used it.
In 2012, the progression accelerated. A diagnosis followed: Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis. By 2013, full quadriplegia. The body withdrew from the work, piece by piece.
But not entirely.
He continued remotely. The problems were still there, waiting to be understood. The machines did not care how the thoughts arrived, only that they were correct.
By 2017, he decided to retire. Not out of acceptance, exactly, but out of a hard assessment of usefulness as he defined it. Invasive ventilation followed. The physical world narrowed further.
And yet, the earlier questions did not go away.
In 2020, conversations began again with former colleagues from VTT. The thread he had picked up years before—heating reactors, practical reactors, reactors that serve rather than impress—returned with new urgency. The world had changed. So had the constraints. But the need for simple, understandable machines had not.
In 2023, he joined Steady Energy.
It is tempting to frame a life like this as a sequence of turns: plasma to fission, research to regulation, health to illness, retirement to return. But that is too neat.
The line is simpler.
A boy takes apart a moped to see how it works.
A man spends a lifetime doing the same, with larger and more consequential machines.
The body, eventually, refuses to cooperate. The work does not.
Because in the end, the task was never to lift or to tighten or to assemble. It was to understand what holds—and what fails—when pressure is applied.
That question remains intact.