The fusion power research programme at GA Technologies Inc

GA Technologies Inc. (formerly General Atomic Company), as one of the oldest industrial participants in fusion research, has had a most profound influence on worldwide fusion progress. The principal theme, spanning nearly three decades of research, has been the tailoring of the magnetic geometry in toroidal configurations to improve plasma stability and confinement properties. Multipole configurations, pioneered at GA, gave some of the earliest evidence that confinement need not be limited by Bohm scaling. The Doublet programme, a direct outgrowth of the multipole work, was the beginning of an international effort, still bearing fruit, to maximize the achievable values of β in thetokamak. OHTE, a helically symmetric toroidal pinch with pitch reversal, is another GA concept, developed recently but harking back to very early work, that has already produced an extensive and promising database.