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.

The commercially available high temperature superconductors (HTS) tapes and wires (BSSCO and REBCO) are introduced and the past and present projects to build fusion devices using HTS based magnets are reviewed. The main design options for high current, high field conductors are presented with the related R&D and the open issues. Depending on the material, the cable layout and the application specific needs, the challenges for HTS magnet technology are different, ranging from the anisotropic properties of the REBCO tapes, to the large volume heat treatment under high pressure for Bi-2212, to the ability to withstand the large transverse loads, to the optimization of the electrical connections for segmented coil assembly, to the ambitious target of fully demountable TF coils for tokamaks. For the generation of magnetic fields larger than 18–20 T, the HTS represents the enabling technology. The use of the expensive HTS can be better justified for applications, which are out of range for conventional, low temperature superconductors (LTS). Eventually, a roadmap for future R&D is sketched focusing on medium term technology milestones, e.g. addressing the issue of quench protection in HTS large magnets, the industrial manufacture of robust high current HTS cables and the engineering design/demonstration of demountable winding packs.

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 HTS prototype conductor sample achieved 100 kA for 1 hour  Mechanical lap-joint confirms low joint resistance (2 nW)  "Joint-winding" of helical coils technically feasible

As the finalization of the hydrogen experiment towards the deuterium phase, the exploration of the best performance of the hydrogen plasma was intensively performed in the Large Helical Device (LHD). High ion and electron temperatures, Ti, Te, of more than 6 keV were simultaneously achieved by superimposing the high power electron cyclotron resonance heating (ECH) on the neutral beam injection (NBI) heated plasma. Although flattening of the ion temperature profile in the core region was observed during the discharges, one could avoid the degradation by increasing the electron density. Another key parameter to present plasma performance is an averaged beta value . The high regime around 4 % was extended to an order of magnitude lower than the earlier collisional regime. Impurity behaviour in hydrogen discharges with NBI heating was also classified with the wide range of edge plasma parameters. Existence of no impurity accumulation regime where the high performance plasma is maintained with high power heating > 10 MW was identified. Wide parameter scan experiments suggest that the toroidal rotation and the turbulence are the candidates for expelling impurities from the core region.