Producing clean power and energy through the fusion of low-Z atoms has been in the daydreams of every scientist since the early days of thermonuclear R&D both in the United States and in the Soviet Union.
Over the years, several other countries such as France, England, Germany, Israel, etc., have also magnetically confined and compressed regions of energetic, ionized particles, AKA plasmas, into a source of radiant energy similar to the Sun’s activity in the transformation of hydrogen into helium.
The initial conceptual design of such a nuclear, magnetic confinement reactor, the Tokamak, was a Soviet achievement that was first developed by a Soviet research team in the late 1960s. Russian readers will recognize the linguistic connection by examining the Russian phrasing given as: (тороидальная камера с магнитными катушками).
Some of the early American contributions happened at xxx university, where Spitzer really caught my attention, even during my days at Penn State where I was a new graduate student.
Much Work in progress follows.
But, what is a tokamak, anyway? The answer to this question is found below. Please see:
The reader may be interested in the Soviet postage stamp (circa 1987) that focused on Russia’s pride in their early tokamak machine. See Tokamak stamp!