We investigate a fluid modeling approach to describe the plasma behavior in tokamaks. For the numerical approximation, we use a high order method based on Fourier expansions in the toroidal direction and the spectral element method (SEM) in the poloidal plane. We first focus on anisotropic diffusion, because in tokamaks diffusion strongly dominates along the magnetic field lines, and provide some comparisons with finite element results. Then we give preliminary results for a plasma two fluid (ions and electrons) numerical model.