Death of the Author

Fri, 27 Mar 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote a play. I am not a playwright. You should be concerned.

My primary motivation was to have a long, complicated, and ultimately flawed document to use to test the abilities of LLMs. I wrote a play. It fits my criteria.

First the play. It is about the Fukushima disaster. As it was the objective, I shall let Claude (Sonnet 4.6 Extended) summarize it for us:

Fission is a stage play structured in four acts, following Masao Yoshida — the real-life superintendent of the Fukushima Daiichi nuclear plant — as he travels outside of normal time, armed with a child’s temporal device, to visit the people who got nuclear power right. Act One drops an audience of time-tourists into the Fukushima control room as the 2011 earthquake and tsunami destroy the plant’s power systems and Yoshida begins defying headquarters to keep coolant flowing into the melting cores. Acts Two and Three move backward through time: to a 1960s GE conference room where three engineers raise precise, arithmetic objections to the Mark I containment design and are overruled; to a 1968 Sendai office where civil engineer Yanosuke Hirai insists on building the Onagawa plant to a 14.8-meter tsunami standard because a shrine in his hometown has remembered a 9th-century wave for eleven centuries; and to a 1963 Washington office where Admiral Rickover absorbs the lessons of the USS Thresher disaster. Act Four assembles Yoshida with Rickover, the French economist Marcel Boiteux, and (fictionalized, composite character) Chernobyl security guard Halyna Kovalenko in a timeless room where the central argument of the play is staged directly: whether nuclear safety — and by implication the safety of any civilization-scale technology — rests finally on individual moral character or institutional design. Yoshida then confesses that in 2008 he held a simulation showing a 15.7-meter tsunami would overwhelm Fukushima’s ten-meter seawall, and did nothing — before returning to the plant to keep the water running anyway.

Notes on Jonathan L Golob

Death of the Author