Tokamak

Revision as of 10:45, 26 October 2009 by Admin (talk | contribs)

A tokamak is a magnetic confinement device in which the poloidal component of the magnetic field is generated mainly by currents flowing in the plasma. The relative simplicity of the tokamak design has led to an initial headway of this design with respect to other prospective designs for a fusion reactor, and the top performance among current fusion experiments has been achieved in tokamaks. As a consequence, next-step devices are based on this design. However, the intrinsic limitations of tokamaks when operated at high values of the operational parameters may lead to an eventual preference for the stellarator design, in spite of its increased complexity.

Defunct tokamaks

  • Alcator A (USA)
  • Alcator C (USA)
  • CASTOR (Prague, Czech Republic)
  • Electric Tokamak (USA)
  • LT-1 (Australia)
  • PBX-M (Princeton, NJ, USA)
  • RTP (Rijnhuizen, The Netherlands)
  • START (UK)
  • T-3 (Russia)
  • T-4 (Russia)
  • T-15 (Russia)
  • TEXT (USA)
  • TFTR (USA)
  • TJ-I (Spain)
  • Tokamak de Varennes (Canada)

Operational tokamaks

Future tokamaks

  • ITER (under construction, France - International)
  • SST-1 (India)
  • DEMO (in design phase)

See also