Q: Are stellarators alternatives to tokamaks?

Above you can see the glowing plasma of a tokamak machine which has become iconic through popularization of fusion by various science fiction movies, series and books that employ fusion tokamaks as a source of energy on spaceships and other future devices.

At the same time tokamaks like ITER have become also iconic as ITER has become the slowest enginnering project humanity has ever undertaken, being under various stages of design and construction from the early eighties of the previous century.

Humanity needs fusion energy as soon as possible to shake its dependece of the fossil fuels. But the size and complexity of magnetic confinement tokamaks make them a very long term investments. At the same time inertial confinement fusion energy has never really gotten of the ground.

But a relatively new magnetic confinement machine called a stellarator has recently gained some traction. Are stellarators alternatives to tokamaks?

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