Directorate of fusion development in the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission. Hirsch felt that the program could not be sustained at its current funding levels without demonstrating tangible results. He began to reformulate the entire program. What had once been a lab-led effort of mostly scientific exploration was now a Washington-led effort to build a working power-producing reactor. This was given a boost by the 1973 oil crisis, which led to greatly increased research into alternative energy systems. 1980s: great hope, great disappointment By the late-1970s, tokamaks had reached all the conditions needed for a practical fusion reactor; in 1978 PLT had demonstrated ignition temperatures, the next year the Soviet T-7 successfully used superconducting magnets for the first time, Doublet proved to be a success and led to almost all future designs adopting this "shaped plasma" approach. It appeared all that was needed to build a power-producing reactor was to put all of these design concepts into a single machine, one that would be capable of running with the radioactive tritium in its fuel mix. The race was on. During the 1970s, four major second-generation proposals were funded worldwide. The Soviets continued their development lineage with the T-15, while a pan-European effort was developing the Joint European Torus (JET) and Japan began the JT-60 effort (originally known as the "Breakeven Plasma Test Facility"). In the US, Hirsch began formulating plans for a similar design, skipping over proposals for another stepping-stone design directly to a tritium-burning one. This emerged as the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor (TFTR), run directly from Washington and not linked to any specific lab. Originally favouring Oak Ridge as the host, Hirsch moved it to PPPL after others convinced him they would work the hardest on it because they had the most to lose. The excitement was so widespread that several commercial ventures to produce commercial tokamaks began around this time. Best known among these, in 1978, Bob Guccione, publisher of Penthouse Magazine, met Robert Bussard and became the world's biggest and most committed private investor in fusion technology, ultimately putting $20 million of his own money into Bussard's Compact Tokamak. Funding by the Riggs Bank led to this effort being known as the Riggatron. TFTR won the construction race and began operation in 1982, followed shortly by JET in 1983 and JT-60 in 1985. JET quickly took the lead in critical experiments, moving from test gases to deuterium