meeting was held in Novosibirsk, where the Soviet delegation surprised everyone by claiming their tokamak designs had reached performance levels at least an order of magnitude better than any other device. The claims were initially met with skepticism, but when the results were confirmed by a UK team the next year, this huge advance led to a "virtual stampede" of tokamak construction. In the US, one of the major approaches being studied up to this point was the stellarator, whose development was limited almost entirely to the PPPL. Their latest design, the Model C, had recently gone into operation and demonstrated performance well below theoretical calculations, far from useful figures. With the confirmation of the Novosibirsk results, they immediately began converting the Model C to a tokamak layout, known as the Symmetrical Tokamak (ST). This was completed in the short time of only eight months, entering service in May 1970. ST's computerized diagnostics allowed it to quickly match the Soviet results, and from that point, the entire fusion world was increasingly focused on this design over any other. Princeton Large Torus During the early 1970s, Shoichi Yoshikawa was looking over the tokamak concept. He noted that as the size of the reactor's minor axis (the diameter of the tube) increased compared to its major axis (the diameter of the entire system) the system became more efficient. An added benefit was that as the minor axis increased, confinement time improved for the simple reason that it took longer for the fuel ions to reach the outside of the reactor. This led to widespread acceptance that designs with lower aspect ratios were a key advance over earlier models. This led to the Princeton Large Torus (PLT), which was completed in 1975. This system was successful to the point where it quickly reached the limits of its Ohmic heating system, the system that passed current through the plasma to heat it. Among the many ideas proposed for further heating, in cooperation with Oak Ridge National Laboratory, PPPL developed the idea of neutral beam injection. This used small particle accelerators to inject fuel atoms directly into the plasma, both heating it and providing fresh fuel. After a number of modifications to the beam injection system, the newly equipped PLT began setting records and eventually made several test runs at 60 million K, more than enough for a fusion reactor. To reach the Lawson criterion