Abstract
The name tokamak comes from the Russian words toroidalnaya kamera magnitnaya katushka meaning “toroidal chamber magnetic coils,” though it might have been appropriate to name it after the Russian word tok, meaning current. As mentioned in Chap.4 , this device was unveiled at the 1958 Geneva Conference. In those days, the Russians had the lead in space satellites, but their fusion research was done with poor equipment and considered primitive. The Americans and Britons, by contrast, had shiny, expensive, and well-engineered machines which they proudly displayed. The tokamak, however, turned out to be the one that worked the best and is the leading type of magnetic plasma container today. It was developed by a team led by Academician Lev Artsimovich on an idea of Andrei Sakharov and Igor Tamm and has been adopted by all nations working on magnetic fusion energy.
Numbers in superscripts indicate Notes and square brackets [] indicate References at the end of this chapter.
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Notes
- 1.
In addition to the vertical drift due to the gradient of the toroidal field, there is also a smaller vertical drift due to the centrifugal force of particles whizzing around the torus the long way.
- 2.
More likely, a collision takes a particle from a banana orbit to a passing orbit, and a second collision takes it from the passing orbit into another banana orbit.
- 3.
There are other devices, called reversed-field pinches, that have a very large toroidal current and only a small toroidal B-field. These depend on other stabilization mechanisms such as wall currents. But we are concentrating on tokamaks here because their development is further along.
- 4.
The fact that banana diffusion does not depend on B t comes from a cancelation between the vertical drift velocity, which varies as 1/B t, and the time a particle spends drifting in one direction, which varies as B t. This is because increasing B t for fixed B p decreases the twist of the field lines.
- 5.
For historical accuracy, neoclassical diffusion was discovered after Bohm diffusion was.
- 6.
This holds only for an intermediate range of sizes.
- 7.
This was not in a tokamak but in a stellarator. In tokamaks, a DC current is needed to create the rotational transform; in stellarators external coils are used to do this.
References
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S.J. Zweben et al., Phys. Plasmas 9, 1981 (2002)
F.F. Chen, The leakage problem in fusion reactors. Sci. Am. 217, 76 (1967)
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Chen, F.F. (2011). The Remarkable Tokamak. In: An Indispensable Truth. Springer, New York, NY. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-4419-7820-2_6
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