system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Could Tokamaks be run in a multi-phase configuration?

Tokamaks rely on current in the plasma to produce a poloidal field. Since the toroidal coils can't keep increasing the field strength forever, could tokamaks benefit from being run in a multiphase configuration? Could the decay of one toroidal field drive the production of another?

Are other heating methods sufficient to maintain a toroidal current, or are tokamaks a fundamentally transient configuration?
gpt
You really don't want to operate a pulsed fusion reactor. First, keep in mind that a reactor will be subject to large thermal and mechanical stresses. Cycling these stress on and off, as would happen in a pulsed reactor, will lead the rapid fatigue of the structural elements.  Also the start up phase of a tokamak is very inefficient. You lose a lot of energy breaking you ionize the gas forming a plasma.

For these reasons non-solenoidal current drive is an active area of research. The good news is that there are several promising forms of current drive that could allow us to operate a tokamak steady state. For example there are techniques like electron cyclotron current drive which uses radio frequency waves to drive current. A plasma will also naturally drive a current as you heat it up. Advanced reactor scenarios us these natural bootstrap currents to efficiently sustain the current.

Finally, a comment on vocabulary. The toroidal fields coils generate the toroidal magnetic field. The central solenoid inductively drives a toroidal plasma current which produces a poloidal magnetic field.