Recent progress in tokamak experiments

MAY 01, 1979

Plasmas confined by magnetic fields in a toroidal geometry can reach confinement times, densities and temperatures approaching those needed for producing useful fusion energy.

DOI: 10.1063/1.2995551

Masanori Murakami

Harold P. Eubank

At the 1968 conference on controlled fusion in Novosibirsk a group from Kurchatov, USSR, led by L. A. Artsimovitch, presented convincing evidence that one conceptually simple method for confining plasmas in a ring showed great promise for future developments. The name for their early machine, the tokamak, has now become the generic name for all such devices. The Russian successes led to a rapid expansion of research with tokamaks, so that while in 1968 there were only nine of them, all in the USSR, there are now more than a hundred; they are in the USSR, the US, Europe, Japan, and elsewhere.

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References

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More about the authors

Masanori Murakami, Fusion Energy Division of Oak Ridge National Laboratory.

Harold P. Eubank, Princeton Plasma Physics Laboratory.