Neutral beams for ITER

Neutral beam injection has been the most successful scheme used to heat magnetically confined plasmas studied in controlled nuclear fusion research, and neutral beams are a candidate to heat to ignition the International Tokamak Experimental Reactor (ITER). This article describes the system which is presently being designed in Europe, Japan, and Russia, with coordination by the Joint Central Team of ITER at Naka, Japan. The proposed system consists of three negative ion based neutral injectors, delivering a total of 50 MW of 1 MeV D-0 to the ITER plasma for pulse length of >1000 s. The proposed injectors each use a single caesiated volume are discharge negative ion source? and a multigrid, multiaperture accelerator, to produce about 40 A of 1 MeV D-. This will be neutralized in a subdivided gas neutralizer, which has a conversion efficiency of about 60%. The charged fraction of the beam emerging from the neutralizer is dumped onto the water-cooled surfaces making up the electrostatic residual ion dump. A water-cooled calorimeter can be moved into the beam path to intercept the neutral beam, allowing commissioning of the injector independent of ITER. (C) 1996 American Institute of Physics.