alt Hacker NewsHe didn't create a nuclear reactor, this is a common misconception. It even says this in the wikipedia article.
He basically got a bunch of radioactive stuff and put it together. He wasn't anywhere close to making a nuclear reactor let alone a nuclear weapon. For a weapon you need isotopes which he didn't have access to.
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Of course. "tried to" being key words in the comment. If he had the help of Claude at the time, how much more dangerous would his bumbling have been?
A real nuclear engineer with the knowledge he needed would also have said "no, don't do that and I won't help you." We are programming the knowledge into the ai agent. Giving ai a little discretion makes sense too.
A bunch of radioactive stuff together is basically the definition of a nuclear reactor though. They even call it a natural nuclear reactor if uranium ore is in sufficient abundance in nature.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Natural_nuclear_fission_reacto...
I'm reminded of when my son, who was six at the time, came into the house and announced that he and the neighbor's boy, nine, were building a bomb, and that he needed to get some stuff from the pantry. When I investigated what exactly was going on, they were putting "hot" things like black pepper and Tabasco into a plastic bowl and were going to "set it off" with a match.
Thankfully, that complete failure seems to have been the end of either of their mad scientist careers, as they are now twenty and twenty-three, and both well-adjusted, peaceful members of the community.