How much time is required to establish and/or reestablish plasma containment in a Tokamak?
What I'm interested in here is the time and trouble required to set up the containment field properly to adequately heat and contain the plasma in a Tokamak nuclear fusion reactor. It is well accepted that sustaining containment is extremely difficult, the maximum time for plasma containment being established currently at just over six minutes. But, if the containment field could be reestablished rapidly enough, this would not necessarily constitute an overwhelming obstacle to practical power production. Power from "up time" could be stored in capacitors, and short down times could be covered adequately in this fashion.
However, if a great deal of time and trouble is required to adequately set up and define the electromagnetic field necessary for plasma containment -- and I strongly suspect that this is generally the case, otherwise, what would all the physicists working on Tokamaks be doing with their time? -- then this might in and of itself constitute an overwhelming obstacle to power production. If it takes a month to set up an electromagnetic field that will only last six minutes, and yield six minutes of power generation, then power production and power storage are rather likely to be a bit overtaxed for all practical purposes, don't you think?
So, does anyone have any sense of how long it generally takes to set up the electromagnetic fields necessary for power generation in Tokamaks? I'm just looking for a kind of average, ballpark figure here -- a minute, an hour, a day, a week, a month, a year -- something along those lines.
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