[2] Goldston attended public schools in Shaker Heights, Ohio, until 1962, when his father became president of Eastern Gas and Fuel Associates of Boston, Massachusetts, and the family moved to nearby Cambridge.
In a 1979 interview, Goldston explained the significance of his research: "If we can accomplish this, we will have created an inexhaustible fuel, which will burn without leaving the quantities of dangerous radioactive waste generated by the atomic power plants we have now.
"[3] Later that decade, Goldston produced physical evidence that fast ions circulating in toroidal magnetically confined plasmas such as the tokamak configuration slowed down in good agreement with classical collision theory, thus providing a physical underpinning for the further development of the powerful neutral beam systems which have heated and driven electric current in successive generations of tokamaks and other magnetic plasma confinement devices such as stellarators.
[4][5] Drawing upon a wide body of experimental data from most of the tokamaks then operating, Goldston developed the first widely applicable empirical scaling relationship for the confinement of energy in tokamak plasmas as a function of such parameters as the major radius, minor radius, density, current, and heating power from such sources as neutral beam systems.
[7] In the 1980s, Goldston led the physics research team on the Tokamak Fusion Test Reactor at Princeton for the United States Department of Energy.
He has also served, since its founding, as a member of the Science and Technology Advisory Committee of the ITER international tokamak project being constructed in the Provence region of France.
[12] In 1987 he was elected a Fellow of the American Physical Society "for outstanding theoretical and experimental contributions to the understanding of transport and heating of tokamak plasmas" [13] Goldston has been a long-time advocate of nuclear disarmament.