Recent analysis of key plasma wall interactions issues for ITER

Abstract Plasma wall interaction (PWI) is important for the material choice in ITER and for the plasma scenarios compatible with material constraints. In this paper, different aspects of the PWI are assessed in their importance for the initial wall materials choice: CFC for the strike point tiles, W in the divertor and baffle and Be on the first wall. Further material options are addressed for comparison, such as W divertor/Be first wall and all-W or all-C. One main parameter in this evaluation is the particle flux to the main vessel wall. One detailed plasma scenario exists for a Q = 10 ITER discharge [G. Federici et al., J. Nucl. Mater. 290–293 (2001) 260] which was taken as the basis of further erosion and tritium retention evaluations. As the assessment of steady state wall fluxes from a scaling of present fusion devices indicates that global wall fluxes may be a factor of 4 ± 3 higher, this margin has been adopted as uncertainty of the scaling. With these wall and divertor fluxes, important PWI processes such as erosion and tritium accumulation have been evaluated: It was found that the steady state erosion is no problem for the lifetime of plasma-facing divertor components. Be wall erosion may pose a problem in case of a concentration of the wall fluxes to small wall areas. ELM erosion may drastically limit the PFC lifetime if ELMs are not mitigated to energies below 0.5 MJ. Dust generation is still a process which requires more attention. Conversion from gross or net erosion to dust and the assessment of dust on hot surfaces need to be investigated. For low-Z materials the build-up of the tritium inventory is dominated by co-deposition with eroded wall atoms. For W, where erosion and tritium co-deposition are small, the implantation, diffusion and bulk trapping constitute the dominant retention processes. First extrapolations with models based on laboratory data show small contributions to the inventory. For later ITER phases and the extrapolation to DEMO additional tritium trapping sites due to neutron-irradiation damage need to be taken into account. Finally, the expected values for erosion and tritium retention are compared to the ITER administrative limits for the lifetime, dust and tritium inventory.