Steady state operation and control experiments on Tore Supra

The main programme of the Tore Supra tokamak is to investigate the route towards long pulse plasma discharges. Tore Supra is thus equipped with a superconducting toroidal magnet, a full set of actively cooled plasma facing components, and a heating and current drive capability based on high power RF systems connected to actively cooled antennas. After pioneering investigations using the LHCD system alone (2 min and zero loop voltage discharges), recent efforts have concentrated on finding scenarios to couple the two RF heating systems in order to perform high power, long duration discharges. To this aim, 6.5 MW, 25 s as well as 4 MW, 60 s discharges have been successfully achieved. At these high power levels, the plasma-wall interaction becomes a critical issue, and recycling fluxes must be controlled to maintain density and to avoid plasma contamination. All these results contributed to the validation of the upgrade of the Tore Supra first wall components (CIEL project) scheduled for 2000.