six months, while Ormak would take a year. It was only a short time later that the confidential results from the Culham Five were released. When they met again in October, the Standing Committee released funding for all of these proposals. The Model C's new configuration, soon named Symmetrical Tokamak, intended to simply verify the Soviet results, while the others would explore ways to go well beyond T-3. Heating: US takes the lead Experiments on the Symmetric Tokamak began in May 1970, and by early the next year they had confirmed the Soviet results and then surpassed them. The stellarator was abandoned, and PPPL turned its considerable expertise to the problem of heating the plasma. Two concepts seemed to hold promise. PPPL proposed using magnetic compression, a pinch-like technique to compress a warm plasma to raise its temperature, but providing that compression through magnets rather than current. Oak Ridge suggested neutral beam injection, small particle accelerators that would shoot fuel atoms through the surrounding magnetic field where they would collide with the plasma and heat it. PPPL's Adiabatic Toroidal Compressor (ATC) began operation in May 1972, followed shortly thereafter by a neutral-beam equipped Ormak. Both demonstrated significant problems, but PPPL leapt past Oak Ridge by fitting beam injectors to ATC and provided clear evidence of successful heating in 1973. This success "scooped" Oak Ridge, who fell from favour within the Washington Steering Committee. By this time a much larger design based on beam heating was under construction, the Princeton Large Torus, or PLT. PLT was designed specifically to "give a clear indication whether the tokamak concept plus auxiliary heating can form a basis for a future fusion reactor". PLT was an enormous success, continually raising its internal temperature until it hit 60 million Celsius (8,000 eV, eight times T-3's record) in 1978. This is a key point in the development of the tokamak; fusion reactions become self-sustaining at temperatures between 50 and 100 million Celsius, PLT demonstrated that this was technically achievable. These experiments, especially PLT, put the US far in the lead in tokamak research. This is due largely to budget; a tokamak cost about $500,000 and the US annual fusion budget was around $25 million at that time. They could afford to explore all of the promising methods of heating, ultimately discovering neutral beams to be among the most effective. During this period, Robert Hirsch took over the