Status and prospect of JT-60 plasma control system for advanced tokamak discharge scenarios

Kurihara, Kenichi; JT-60 Team

Since tokamak magnetic fusion research has just made a step forward to an international collaborative project ITER, the existing tokamaks including JT-60 are expected to explore more advanced operation scenarios toward the ITER and a future power reactor. Hence, we believe the following experimental issues are to be adequately discussed, and possibly to be solved in JT-60: To clarify how to keep a steady-state plasma with high performance, and how to avoid plasma instabilities almost completely. By stimulus of this motivation, the JT-60 plasma real-time control system has been drastically improved with remodeling in hardware as well as in software. In particular, several essential developments for exploring advanced scenarios have been accomplished or are being conducted. In the developments, we adopted the fast board computers' network linking through large reflective memories. Finally, in addition to presentation on plasma control engineering activities in JT-60, we would like to envisage a future plasma control system toward a power reactor.