I'm 65, a "boomer", and so forgive me if I am utterly disgusted with the total lack of work ethic that millennials have. In my view Elon Musk has the proper understanding of the world, "If nobody makes stuff, then there is no stuff." This is accurate. And as much as I'd like AI to be able to replace the total lack of brain cells in millennials and make stuff for us all, it won't happen without a much cheaper and more abundant energy source than we have now, the issue is quite simple, the human brain uses 20-30 watts of power, AI uses megawatts to gigawatts. The apathy of young people today really breaks my heart, all they want to do is vegetate, have non-productive butt sex or cut all their genitals off and then sedate themselves with fentynal, the result, people are dying young and not reproducing, no future hope for the human civilization if this doesn't change.

An important thing for young people to understand, pleasure is NOT happiness, pleasure is short-term not lasting and generally results in an overall decrease in happiness. Another important thing to understand, nothing of value comes without truth and responsibility. If you don't live in truth, if you don't take responsibility for how you impact not only your own life but also the lives of others, nothing of values will come from this.

I know many of the problems today seem insurmountable but they are not, but change is required. Society has to move away from random sex and get back to the nuclear family. Crime and children raised without a father go hand in hand. So if we want a productive society first thing we need is father's to take responsibility for their offspring, and this can only happen in stable family relationships. I know you fear losing your pleasure but you'll gain happiness and it's long term and self-reinforcing in nature, the opposite of pleasure. These things are right next to each other in your brain and seem very similar and pleasure can be obtained quickly while happiness takes longer but it is better to be a two cookie person than a one, that is being willing to wait for delayed gratification because the gratification is better when it is long term.

One of the things I liked about Trump is he understood the importance of making a larger pie instead of fighting for a larger slice of a dwindling pie.

Back to making stuff, we need energy, human energy and physical mechanical or electrical energy. AI can help us but without the energy to power it, it can't help us, it can only compete for pie.

Windmills and solar cells can't provide base load power and there simply is no economically viable storage that can store the required amount of energy to get us through periods of no wind and no sun. We need a base-load source, and while people worry about global warming, the truth of the matter is there probably aren't enough accessible fossil fuels to double atmospheric CO2. That's not to say there aren't enough fossil fuels to do that and more, it is to say there aren't enough remaining that are economically recoverable to do so.

There are things we can do to allow our grid to accommodate more intermittent power, such as more efficient long distance ultra high voltage DC interties, these have the advantage of getting more juice through the same lines and insulators because the insulators have to be rated at 1.414 times the average power for AC, but DC can use 100% of their rating and DC doesn't radiate, so no loss in power from radiation with DC, and going to higher voltages allows more power to be transmitted at lower loss. A second advantage, DC lines are not subject to damage from solar flares or EMP, these source both destroy transformers on AC lines because they are very low frequency sources and AC transformers have low impedance at lower frequencies resulting in higher current, but DC lines just see a slight bump or dip in the voltage which the inverters at the receiving end adjust for and it goes pretty much unnoticed. But we still need a good base load source and nuclear reactors are ideal for this, but not the pressurized water reactors burning U-235 that we have now from both a safety, waste, and fuel availability standpoint.

U-235 is only .7% of natural Uranium, and in a conventional pressurized water we can maybe get a 50% burn of that, so in a conventional pressurized water reactor, we are only utilizing .35% of natural uranium's energy potential and because we leave so much unused energy potential is the very reason we have long term waste issues. If we use ALL of the fissile and fissionable (by breeding fissile isotopes into fissionable ones and doing this for all the transuranic waste products), not only do we use 100% of the uranium's energy potential, but the only waste products then left are the fission products which are all safe after only 300 years.

And if we use Thorium, we have 3x as much Thorium in the Earth's crust than Uranium and practically an infinite amount in the oceans. Further thorium is a byproduct of rare-Earth's mining, so essentially free fuel.

Aside from not being able to burn these fuels, pressurized water reactors are extremely dangerous precisely because they are pressurized. They need to be pressurized because water below 600C or so can't drive turbines efficiently and in order to prevent it from boiling at a lower temperature it is necessary to keep it under about 200 atmospheres of pressure. The safety issue here is you break a pipe and all that water turns to steam immediately. This means instant destruction of the reactor and in spite of theory usually also the containment building. Second safety issue is boiling water reactors have solid fuel, this means that the fission products stay in the fuel. This means even if you shut the reactor down, the decay of these fission products continue to produce heat, and this is what is responsible for nuclear melt-downs.

There is a better way, molten salt breeder reactors. These can burn existing nuclear waste, all the transuranics, fissile U-238 which they will convert to PL-239 and then burn, and Th-232 which it will breed to U-233 and burn.

Because molten salt reactors have the fission products continuously removed, they do not continue to produce significant heat when shut down. Oak Ridge tested such a reactor by pulling the control rods so it was operating full tilt and then turning off the cooling, and all that happened was the salt expanded and self-regulated. No melt-down, no reactor damage, no threat to the environment.

These reactors have a safety device known as a melt plug and a drain tank. The idea is IF things overheat, something that Oak Ridge was not able to cause intentionally, it melts the plug, the liquid salt fuel mix drains into a much larger tank that can dissipate the residual heat. Since these devices are completely passive, a loss of power or operator error CAN NOT cause a meltdown or release of radiation.

Further, because these operate at near atmospheric pressure (SOME pump pressure is necessary to circulate the salt through the heat exchanger but this is on the order of 1.4 atmospheres not 200), if a pipe breaks no explosion results, some fuel may fall onto the floor, where it solidifies, can be scooped up, and dumped back in the reactor, and because the fission products are continuously removed, it will be no more radioactive than the fuel so not a hazard to workers.

Now beware, there is another type of reactor being promoted called a small modular nuclear reactor. These are probably safer than pressurized water reactors because of lower scale and the fuel being encased in silicon-carbide, but because of this only a low fuel burn can be achieved and because silicon-carbide has such a high melting point, recycling the fuel is not possible thus these reactors create an million year waste problem. There attraction is they are cheap, but long term waste and safety are issues.

If we go with molten-salt reactors, we can power the Earth for at least the next 10,000 years, maybe longer, and that should be enough time to get fusion working.