Present status of development on 500keV negative ion source

Yamamoto, Takumi; Oga, Tokumichi; Kawai, Mikito; Akino, Noboru; Kazawa, Minoru; Umeda, Naotaka

In JAERI, 10 MW and 500 keV negative-ion based neutral beam injection (N-NBI) system for JT-60U was constructed in 1996, in order to study a plasma heating and current drive in high-density plasma by high-energy beam injection. Thereafter, improvement of beam performance has been carried out while N-NBI system was available for experiments on JT-60U. The maximum beam energy of 418 keV and the maximum injection power of 6.2 MW have been achieved with a hydrogen beam, so far. In addition, 10 seconds of injection pulse duration, which is the designed value, was attained at the injection power of 2.6MW. Further improvement is required for the performance to reach to the final targets. It was made it clear that the performance was limited by the withstanding voltage of acceleration and heat load on acceleration grids in the ion source.