START

The Small Tight Aspect Ratio Tokamak (START) was operated at Culham Centre for Fusion Energy from 1990 to 1998. It had the same design as the MAST tokamak but the outer aluminum vacuum vessel was larger. START was built to study plasma behavior at an aspect ratio (major radius/minor radius) below 2.0 and it was the first operational spherical tokamak. START investigated the plasma physics specific to low aspect ratio tokamaks.