Management of water leaks on Tore Supra actively cooled fusion device

Up to now, Tore Supra is the only fusion device fully equipped with actively cooled Plasma Facing Components (PFCs). In case of abnormal events during a plasma discharge, the PFCs could be submitted to a transient high power density (run away electrons) or to a continuous phenomena as local thermal flux induced by trapped suprathermal electrons or ions). It could lead to a degradation of the PFC integrity and in the worst case to a water leak occurrence. Such water leak has important consequence on the tokamak operation that concerns PFCs themselves, monitoring equipment located in the vacuum vessel or connected to the ports as RF antennas, diagnostics or pumping systems. Following successive water leak events (the most important water leak, that occurred in September 2002, is described in the paper), a large feedback experience has been gained on Tore supra since more than 15 years that could be useful to actively cooled next devices as W7X and ITER. (authors)