Experiments in confinement and plasma-wall interaction, and innovative confinement concepts

Full text: Significant progress has been made since the 19th IAEA Fusion Energy Conference in the following areas: - Long pulse operation with high beta and high bootstrap fraction much longer than the current diffusion time; - Extension of parameter regimes for the ITER baseline scenario and for steady state/hybrid scenarios and their sustainability; - Understanding of global confinement and transport physics, especially non-dimensional scaling, zonal flow and particle transport; - Material and retention/migration studies. Discharge scenario optimization and its extrapolation towards ITER have progressed remarkably, by which the feasibility of ITER reaching the baseline target performance has been confirmed. Results of β scan and particle transport could lead to higher fusion power in ITER. Efforts to reach a common understanding of the physics of toroidal plasmas across the magnetic configurations have been made and many interesting results have been obtained. These results will greatly contribute to ITER and the ultimate goal of fusion power. (author)