Real-Time Control of Advanced Scenarios for Steady-State Tokamak Operation

This lecture was given at the 4th ITER International Summer School in Austin, Texas, May 31–June 4, 2010. It reviews the recent experimental and modeling progress made to design real-time kinetic and magnetic profile control of advanced scenarios for steady-state tokamak operation. The lecture addresses four challenging issues that need to be resolved and that are open to future research activities: (a) how to operate a tokamak in a continuous manner, (b) how to control the core kinetic and magnetic profiles of tokamak plasmas, (c) how to control the fusion burn in plasmas with dominant self-generated bootstrap non-inductive current and fusion-born alpha heating, and (d) how to control simultaneously core and edge plasma parameters.