RF drives tokamak plasma currents

A steady‐state scheme for plasma‐current drive would greatly enhance the attractiveness of the tokamak as a fusion reactor. The fact that a conventional tokamak reactor would have to operate in a pulsed mode presents serious engineering difficulties. Even though the length of such pulses could be as long as an hour (followed by a recovery time of less than a minute), pulsed operation raises the problem of thermal fatigue.