Summary
Anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of the quest for fusion power will know that for many years, the leading candidate has been a magnetic confinement device called the tokamak, from a Russian acronym for toroidal chamber with an axial magnetic field. At least 221 tokamaks have been built, planned, or decommissioned worldwide. Almost every modern nation interested in fusion has had a tokamak machine—from Kazakhstan to Russia to Japan to Brazil. For almost a generation, a large majority of Americans involved in fusion—researchers, government officials, scientists, and university professors—have been tokamak people. This chapter is an overview of the development of the tokamak, its successes to date, and how it eventually became the most dominant fusion reactor approach. Readers looking for more detail on its history and technology should consult the Recommended Reading section, which lists several excellent books on the subject.
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Moynihan, M., Bortz, A.B. (2023). Tokamaks and Spherical Tokamaks. In: Fusion's Promise. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-22906-0_6
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