Fusion, Maybe

We really don't, but the fossil carbon extraction industry likes to deny this, and John Larkin does seem to believe all the nonsense that Anthony Watts serves up on their behalf.

What's good about it? The more you know, the less you like Trump.

By which James Arthur probably meant that Joe Biden hadn't agreed with the Republicans.

As with all such assertions, it's example-free.

The first step of the reactions require moderation of the neutrons, using moderators that are only in the reactor. If the fuel overheats it melts a salt plug that allows it to drain into a tank where there is no moderator. The reactions are no longer initiated. The heat is dissipated passively. The reactions die down in a relatively short time. The world is safe for the family.

Do you really not understand this or are you talking about some other problem?

I can't think of any. Please advise.

Don't invoke the Jurassic Park Dr. Ian Malcolm : "John, the kind of control you're attempting simply is... it's not possible. If there is one thing the history of evolution has taught us it's that life will not be contained. Life breaks free, it expands to new territories and crashes through barriers, painfully, maybe even dangerously, but, uh... well, there it is."

As if failure is inherent.

Same is true for virtually any chemical factory or petroleum plant. Look at the Bhopal disaster. That didn't even require a nuke.

With a half life of 200,000 years, would that not be only very slightly radioactive?

I was reading something about wind energy and found that in that area (don't recall the details) wind fell off dramatically as a seasonal thing, possibly winter. That is not likely to ever become manageable by building storage.

Most people who complain that grid storage won't work aren't really looking at much relevant data. But I've never found data that says it can work effectively either.

Actually, it's good. Cold kills about 10x as many people as heat.

Temps are up a couple of degs C from the Little Ice Age, which was really bad news. The next big ice age would kill off most of the critters on earth. Maybe we can prevent it.

If nothing else blocks the hole the salt plug had been blocking. and the tank hasn't been filled with something else that wouldn't have been expected to end up in it, but did. Disasters don't always play out the way we'd like them to.

The contests of the tank are still intensely radioactive, and will stay that way for quite a while.

Do you really think that an optimists idea of the way a disaster might play out is the only possible scenario?

Get a better brain.

It does happen pretty often, if unpredictably.

Not remotely true. There's a lot more concentrated nastiness in the middle of a nuclear reactor than any chemical plant - enough to make a country the size of Belgium uninhabitable for several thousand years.

Technetium-99 is only one of three more or less stable isotopes Te-97 and Te-98 have half-lives of about 4.2 million years, so are even more slightly radioactive. Nuclear fission produces lots of others elements and some of the isotopes are shorter-lived. You don't want any of them.

In your ever-so-expert opinion. The local obsession is to use solar power to make elelctrolitic hydrogen in Australia and liquify it here before shipping it off to Japan and South Korea.

You can store months of energy as liquid hydrogen (as you can with liquified petroleum gas). You only get back a quarter of the energy you used to make the liquid hydrogen, but that doesn't seem to be worrying anybody.

It isn't a cheap - at the moment - as a fast-start gas-turbine powered generator running on natural gas - now - or hydrogen - later.

Or has, so far. Heat waves are starting to kill people too, and we are getting more of them.

None of the previous ones did. We've been having one every hundred thousand years or so for the past few million years.

We already have,

Misleading.

False argument. We are not in an ice age. Rising temperatures due to CO2 from burning fossil fuels are causing severe hurricanes and heat waves which kill people and cause great damage. Rising temperatures are melting glaciers in Greenland and Antarctica, causing flooding in coastal areas.

Permafrost in Siberia is melting, releasing huge quantities of methane, a potent greenhouse gas. This causes further increases in temperature, which causes further melting.

Organizations around the world have recognized the danger the planet is in from global warming. Unfortunately, fixing the problem is very difficult, and temperatures are expected to rise.

A foolish concept. Rising temperatures will kill more people while you are waiting for the next ice age.

Quote from your link:

"Several causes have been proposed: cyclical lows in solar radiation, heightened volcanic activity (specifically the catastrophic Kaharoa eruption of Mount Tarawera in 1315[12]), changes in the ocean circulation, variations in Earth's orbit and axial tilt (orbital forcing), inherent variability in global climate, and decreases in the human population"

- what decreases in human population have to do with ice ages is not clear.

"Global average temperatures show that the Little Ice Age was not a distinct planet-wide time period but the end of a long temperature decline, which preceded the recent global warming.[1]"

The image showing temperature changes during the little ice age are completely overwhelmed by the temperature rise due to burning fossil fuels and release of methane:

From Wikipedia:

"Contemporary climate change includes both global warming and its impacts on Earth's weather patterns. There have been previous periods of climate change, but the current changes are distinctly more rapid and not due to natural causes.[2] Instead, they are caused by the emission of greenhouse gases, mostly carbon dioxide (CO2) and methane. Burning fossil fuels for energy use creates most of these emissions. Agriculture, steelmaking, cement production, and forest loss are additional sources.[3] Greenhouse gases are transparent to sunlight, allowing it through to heat the Earth's surface. When the Earth emits that heat as infrared radiation the gases absorb it, trapping the heat near the Earth's surface. As the planet heats up it causes changes like the loss of sunlight-reflecting snow cover, amplifying global warming.[4]"

While you can try to fabricate arguments in favor of your denials, the documented facts are against you.

The statistics in Death Valley say otherwise.

Did I say we were? I thought I said that temps are up from the LIA. We are actually in a fairly rare inter-glacial period, which is why you and me are alive.

Rising temperatures due to CO2

Sea level is increasing about 2mm per year. Kids with plastic shovels and pails of sand could keep up with that.

Coral islands are mostly getting bigger. I guess the corals like warm water and lots of CO2.

Don't build a ranch-style house on the beach. Obama and his pals are all building ocean-front estates where they have parties without masks.

Fear and neurosis and hysteria. It's beautiful outside. I like it.

Well, it is called Death Valley for a reason. Nobody can claim they weren't warned.

Hilarious. Any oil, gas, or coal that you don't want, the Chinese and Indians and Africans and South Americans will be glad to take off your hands. The Australians will sell them as many megatons of coal as they can shove into their new power plants.

The Russians and Saudis (and Americans) will cheerfully furnish oil and gas.

A billion people on Earth don't have electricity, heat, decent shelter, or clean water. They will get it, even though w(h)iney Tesla-driving air-conditioned jet-set New York Times subscribers want to keep them poor.

Does anyone know what is wrong with the brain of this curmudgeon? Why does he paint anyone who doesn't share his fantasies as evil and selfish? At some point the conversation is no longer about the issue, because while he mentions energy, he isn't really talking about energy, he is talking about what people think.

God, he lives in such a miserable world.

That sounds like a recommendation for a riot organizer. People being ballistic is... unhealthy.

My humble apologies. I got the number wrong.

Yep, they got the number wrong, too. Fire, flood, and crop failures are all to be expected in a warming earth, and only the immediate-ambient-temperature effects are in that assessment. There wouldn't be a Paris Accord if we were blind outside that one spot.

Remove blinders and take in more information.

Yes, expected any minute now. We have been 6 or 10 or 12 years from disaster for, what, 50 years now?

Remember The Population Bomb, Peak Oil, mass starvation? 1/5 of the US population dead from AIDS?

Oh, as to the epic fires that took out 5% of the world's wheat crop, that was twelve years ago.

This is the person who ridiculed the prediction that 250,000 would die of Covid in the US by the end of 2020. We actually hit that number in November and nearly reached 400,000 by year end. Now we can expect to see the count at 1,000,000 before the end of March. Yet he still mocks those who take the disease seriously.

His misunderstanding of the basic concepts he ridicules is amazing. His inconsistency is equally amazing. The NASA link about excess CO2 being part of greening the earth is entirely based on computer models. Computer models that he so often ridicules as meaning nothing when analyzing global warming. Perhaps Larkin has multiple personalities? Part of him says "maybe", part of him says "maybe not".