Installation of a plasmatron at the belgian nuclear research centre and its use for plasmaawall interaction studies

In JET and ITER, the first wall will be covered by beryllium and a full or partial W divertor will be common. In DEMO, only highaZ, low erosion material such as tungsten will be present as a plasma facing material. In present day tokamaks, the very high fluence/low temperature plasma cannot be obtained. Important key issues to be resolved according to plasma wall interaction studies are the tritium retention, dust production, resilience to large steadyastate fluences, transient loads, surface erosion, material redeposition and neutron damage. Some linear plasma simulators come close to the very high fluences expected in ITER and DEMO such as PSI-2; PISCES-B; NAGDISaII and pilot-PSI. In future the larger device MAGNUM-PSI will have even higher fluences and lower temperatures for large scale components. The plasmatron facility VISION I to be installed in Mol, will have the capability to investigate mixed materials (with beryllium/tritium contaminations) and in the long term neutron activated samples. The ETHEL plasmatron VISION I from JRC-Ispra was transferred to SCKCEN (Mol, Belgium) recently. The equipment is meant to study plasma-wall interaction, in particular the interaction with hydrogen isotopes. The facility is capable to produce relatively cold selfasustained volumetric plasmas with a high plasma flux density at the target of about 1020-1021 ions/m2.s. The plasmatron has a volume of 18 litres, a target diameter of ∼25 cm and modular ion energies in the range of 20-500 eV.