Overview of the deuterium inventory campaign in Tore Supra: Operational conditions and particle balance

Abstract A specific experiment was performed in Tore Supra, dedicated to the search for consistency between wall inventories estimated from gas balance and post-mortem analysis and to the characterization of the D-retention mechanism. More than 160 similar discharges were performed, representing a cumulative time of 18 000 s of plasma with no intermediate conditioning procedure. The only significant operational issue was linked to the ejection of flakes from the plasma facing components, whose frequency increased dramatically during the campaign, triggering a plasma detachment phase followed by a disruption in number of cases. In-vessel inventory was increased by ∼3.1 × 1024 D, and constant retention rate (∼2.3 × 1020 D/s averaged over discharge duration) was measured, with no indication of wall saturation. First measurements on dismantled tiles of the Toroidal Pump Limiter (TPL) show [D]/[C] ratios ranging from 0.04 to 0.20, on a typical thickness of 15–20 μm. Extrapolated to the whole TPL, this yields an amount of ∼(1.5 ± 0.3) × 1024 D, i.e. ∼50% of the estimated in-vessel inventory.