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gwern comments on Rationality Boot Camp - Less Wrong
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To the best of my knowledge, in 1898, uranium salts emitting 'X-rays' were the hottest thing going and Marie Curie was just presenting her discovery of thorium after refining tons of pitchblende. How could one even conceive of nuclear power plants at this point?
I think brazil is making an analogy between nuclear power and "godlike" AIs. Perhaps inappropriate for this forum, but comprehensible.
Surely it occurred to some people that whatever reaction was creating the X-rays might one day be the source of tremendous amounts of energy which could be used for constructive (or destructive) purposes.
No, it would not occur, any more than it occurs to you, 'how could I design a safe Brownian Motion power plant [using only knowledge available in 1898]?'
Both are strange relatively recently discovered anomalies relating to energy which were poorly understood and were being studied by some of the greatest minds; for neither did it seem likely they would be so practical as to be the source of tremendous amounts of energy. (I emphasized 'tons' for a reason.)
I did a few Google searches; it seems that in 1913 HG Wells speculated about the use of atomic power for military and industrial purposes. A 1904 New York Times article talks about how "the new discoveries in radio-activity have revealed a new source of power more ample than any other known in intra-atomic energy"
So it seems pretty clear that people were speculating about atomic energy from the early days of experimentation with radioactive materials.
If you like, we can change the date of my exercise from1898 to 1920.
That would be much better. 22 years can make a huge difference. (Imagine discussing flaws in the Internet in 1982 versus 1960.)
Allowing, of course, that another hundred years has made a difference in just how huge a difference 22 years can represent!
Ok, so the exercise will be to design a safe nuclear reactor using only information and knowledge available in 1920.
The scariest thing (abstractly speaking) about the situation in Japan is that the early reactors were sited before people knew very much about plate tectonics. What are other important unknown unknowns about other things we're doing?
And what is the likelihood that there exist important unknown unknowns?
In 1920, could anyone have known that one of the key aspects of nuclear power plant design was that you need a very reliable backup cooling system?
Could they have at least assessed the probability that they were not considering something important?