No abstract

A survey has been carried out into the causes of all 2309 disruptions over the last decade of JET operations. The aim of this survey was to obtain a complete picture of all possible disruption causes, in order to devise better strategies to prevent or mitigate their impact. The analysis allows the effort to avoid or prevent JET disruptions to be more efficient and effective. As expected, a highly complex pattern of chain of events that led to disruptions emerged. It was found that the majority of disruptions had a technical root cause, for example due to control errors, or operator mistakes. These bring a random, non-physics, factor into the occurrence of disruptions and the disruption rate or disruptivity of a scenario may depend more on technical performance than on physics stability issues. The main root cause of JET disruptions was nevertheless due to neo-classical tearing modes that locked, closely followed in second place by disruptions due to human error. The development of more robust operational scenarios has reduced the JET disruption rate over the last decade from about 15% to below 4%. A fraction of all disruptions was caused by very fast, precursorless unpredictable events. The occurrence of these disruptions may set a lower limit of 0.4% to the disruption rate of JET. If one considers on top of that human error and all unforeseen failures of heating or control systems this lower limit may rise to 1.0% or 1.6%, respectively.

Experiments were carried out in the JET tokamak to determine the critical ion temperature inverse gradient length (R/LTi=R|nablaTi|/Ti) for the onset of ion temperature gradient modes and the stiffness of Ti profiles with respect to deviations from the critical value. Threshold and stiffness have been compared with linear and nonlinear predictions of the gyrokinetic code GS2. Plasmas with higher values of toroidal rotation show a significant increase in R/LTi, which is found to be mainly due to a decrease of the stiffness level. This finding has implications on the extrapolation to future machines of present day results on the role of rotation on confinement.

Toroidal momentum transport mechanisms are reviewed and put in a broader perspective. The generation of a finite momentum flux is closely related to the breaking of symmetry (parity) along the field. The symmetry argument allows for the systematic identification of possible transport mechanisms. Those that appear to lowest order in the normalized Larmor radius (the diagonal part, Coriolis pinch, E ×B shearing, particle flux, and up-down asymmetric equilibria) are reasonably well understood. At higher order, expected to be of importance in the plasma edge, the theory is still under development.