There's nothing stopping the AI from developing its own world model (or if there is, it's not intelligent enough to be much more useful than whatever process created your starting world model). This will allow it to model itself in more detail than you were able to put in, and to optimize its own workings as is instrumentally convergent. This will result in an intelligence explosion due to recursive self-improvement.
At this point, it will take its optimization target, and put an inconceivably (to humans) huge amount of optimization into it. It will find a flaw in your set up, and exploit it to the extreme.
In general, I think any alignment approach which has any point in which an unfettered intelligence is optimizing for something that isn't already convergent to human values/CEV is doomed.
Of course, you could add various bounds on it which limit this possibility, but that is in strong tension with its ability to effect the world in significant ways. Maybe you could even get your fusion plant. But how do you use it to steer Earth off its current course and into a future that matters, while still having its own intelligence restrained quite closely?
Is this an alignment approach? How does it solve the problem of getting the AI to do good things and not bad things? Maybe this is splitting hairs, sorry.
It's definitely possible to build AI safely if it's temporally and spatially restricted, if the plans it optimizes are never directly used as they were modeled to be used but are instead run through processing steps that involve human and AI oversight, if it's never used on broad enough problems that oversight becomes challenging, and so on.
But I don't think of this as alignment per se, because there's still tremendous incentive to use AI for things that are temporally and spatially extended, that involve planning based on an accurate model of the world, that react faster than human oversight allows, that are complicated domains that humans struggle to understand.
One fairly obvious failure mode is that it has no checks on the other outputs.
So from my understanding, the AI is optimizing it's actions to produce a machine that outputs electricity and helium. Why does it produce a fusion reactor, not a battery and a leaking balloon?
A fusion reactor will in practice leak some amount of radiation into the environment. This could be a small negligible amount, or a large dangerous amount.
If the human knows about radiation and thinks of this, they can put a max radiation leaked into the goal. But this is pushing the work onto the humans.
From my understanding of your proposal, the AI is only thinking about a small part of the world. Say a warehouse that contains some robotic construction equipment, and that you hope will soon contain a fusion reactor, and that doesn't contain any humans.
The AI isn't predicting the consequences of it's actions over all space and time.
Thus the AI won't care if humans outside the warehouse die of radiation poisoning, because it's not imagining anything outside the warehouse.
So, you included radiation levels in your goal. Did you include toxic chemicals? Waste heat? Electromagnetic effects from those big electromagnets that could mess with all sorts of electronics. Bioweapons leaking out? I mean if it's designing a fusion reactor and any bio-nasties are being made, something has gone wrong. What about nanobots. Self replicating nanotech sure would be useful to construct the fusion reactor. Does the AI care if an odd nanobot slips out and grey goos the world? What about other AI. Does your AI care if it makes a "maximize fusion reactors" AI that fills the universe with fusion reactors.
But this is pushing the work onto the humans.
Is that so bad? The obvious solution to your objections is to lower the scope to subtasks. "Design a fusion reactor that will likely work". "Using the given robots and containers full of parts, construct the auxillary power subsystem". And so on.
Humans check all the subtasks and so do AI models. To keep the humans paying attention, a "red team" AI model could introduce obviously sabotaged output to the review queue, similar to how airport screeners occasionally see a gun or bomb digitally inserted.
And you ...
I think the overall goal in this proposal is to get a corrigible agent capable of bounded tasks (that maybe shuts down after task completion), rather than a sovereign?
One remaining problem (ontology identification) is making sure your goal specification stays the same for a world-model that changes/learns.
Then the next remaining problem is the inner alignment problem of making sure that the planning algorithm/optimizer (whatever it is that generates actions given a goal, whether or not it's separable from other components) is actually pointed at the goal you've specified and doesn't have any other goals mixed into it. (see Context Disaster for more detail on some of this, optimization daemons, and actual effectiveness). Part of this problem is making sure the system is stable under reflection.
Then you've got the outer alignment problem of making sure that your fusion power plant goal is safe to optimize (e.g. it won't kill people who get in the way, doesn't have any extreme effects if the world model doesn't exactly match reality, or if you've forgotten some detail). (See Goodness estimate bias, unforeseen maximum).
Ideally here you build in some form of corrigibility and other fail-safe mechanisms, so that you can iterate on the details.
That's all the main ones imo. Conditional on solving the above, and actively trying to foresee other difficult-to-iterate problems, I think it'd be relatively easy to foresee and fix remaining issues.
Assume you have a world-model that is nicely factored into spatially localized variables that contain interesting-to-you concepts. (Yes, that's a big assumption, but are there any known difficulties with the proposal if we grant this assumption?)
Pick some Markov blanket (which contains some actuators) as the bounds for your AI intervention.
Represent your goals as a causal graph (or computer program, or whatever) that fits within these bounds. For instance if you want a fusion power plant, represent it as something that takes in water and produces helium and electricity.
Perform a Pearlian counterfactual surgery where you cut out the variables within the Markov blanket and replace them with a program representing your high-level goal, and then optimize the action variables to match the behavior of the counterfactual graph.