International collaboration on development of a stellarator confinement database has progressed. More than 3000 data points from nine major stellarator experiments have been compiled. Robust dependences of the energy confinement time on the density and the heating power have been confirmed. Dependences on other operational parameters, i.e. the major and minor radii, magnetic field and the rotational transform , have been evaluated using inter-machine analyses. In order to express the energy confinement in a unified scaling law, systematic differences in each subgroup are quantified. An a posteriori approach using a confinement enhancement factor on ISS95 as a renormalizing configuration-dependent parameter yields a new scaling expression ISS04; . Gyro–Bohm characteristic similar to ISS95 has been confirmed for the extended database with a wider range of plasma parameters and magnetic configurations than in the study of ISS95. It has also been discovered that there is a systematic offset of energy confinement between magnetic configurations, and its measure correlates with the effective helical ripple of the external stellarator field. Full documentation of the International Stellarator Confinement Database is available at http://iscdb.nifs.ac.jp/ and http://www.ipp.mpg.de/ISS.

The three-dimensional (3D) magnetohydrodynamic (MHD) equilibrium solver HINT is improved as a new HINT code, 'HINT2' having various useful features by introducing modern computing techniques. By using the algorithm inherent to HINT2, the treatment of the peripheral plasma corresponding to the experimental results is addressed in the Large Helical Device (LHD).

In the Large Helical Device (LHD), the highest operational averaged beta value has been expanded from 3.2% to 4% in the last 2 years by increasing the heating capability and exploring a new magnetic configuration with a high aspect ratio. Although the magneto-hydrodynamic (MHD) stability properties are considered to be unfavourable in the new high aspect configuration, the heating efficiency due to neutral beams and the transport properties are expected to be favourable in a high-beta range. In order to clarify the effect of the global ideal MHD unstable mode on the operational regimes in helical systems, especially the beta gradients in the peripheral region and the beta value, the MHD analysis and the transport analysis are performed in a high-beta range of up to 4% in LHD. In a high-beta range of more than 3%, the maxima of the observed thermal pressure gradients at a low order rational magnetic surface in the peripheral region are marginally unstable to the low-mode-number ideal MHD instability. Though a gradual degradation of the local transport in the region has been observed as beta increases, a disruptive degradation of the local transport does not appear in the beta range up to 4%.

OVERVIEW OF THE LARGE HELICAL DEVICE PROJECT. The Large Helical Device (LHD) has successfully started running plasma confinement experiments after a long construction period of eight years. During the construction and machine commissioning phases, a variety of milestones were attained in fusion engineering which successfully led to the first operation, and the first plasma was ignited on 31 March 1998. Two experimental campaigns are planned in 1998. In the first campaign, the magnetic flux mapping clearly demonstrated a nested structure of magnetic surfaces. The first plasma experiments were conducted with second harmonic 84 and 82.6 GHz ECH at a heating power input of 0.35 MW. The magnetic field was set at 1.5 T in these campaigns so as to accumulate operational experience with the superconducting coils. In the second campaign, auxiliary heating with NBI at 3 MW has been carried out. Averaged electron densities of up to 6 × 10 19 m-3 , central temperatures ranging from 1.4 IAEA-F1-CN-69/OV1/4 2 to 1.5 keV and stored energies of up to 0.22 MJ have been attained despite the fact that the impurity level has not yet been minimized. The obtained scarling of energy confinement time has been found to be consistent with the ISS95 scaling law with some enhancement.