Reply To: The Texas 22nd Primary Elections on March 4th

[jamesr]

If you relate fusion research to something people are maybe more aware of like cancer research then you can begin to make comparisons.

Research into a cure for cancer has been going on for hundreds of years compared to sixty or so for fusion.

Although there is not cure as such, cancer research has lead to intermediate, incremental advances in drugs and surgical techniques that have lowered mortality rates by a few percent a year.
The incremental advances in fusion on the other hand, have increased fusion yields by 5 orders of magnitude over the last 30 years (or around 35% per year on average).

The problem from the public perspective is that they can see the benefits of cancer research in their everyday lives even though they have not reached a ‘cure’, but for fusion there is no tangible benefit until someone finds that ‘cure’ for the fusion engineering challenge and reaches breakeven.