The JET 2019-2020 scientific and technological programme exploited the results of years of concerted scientific and engineering work, including the ITER-like wall (ILW: Be wall and W divertor) installed in 2010, improved diagnostic capabilities now fully available, a major Neutral Beam Injection (NBI) upgrade providing record power in 2019-2020, and tested the technical & procedural preparation for safe operation with tritium. Research along three complementary axes yielded a wealth of new results. Firstly, the JET plasma programme delivered scenarios suitable for high fusion power and alpha particle physics in the coming D-T campaign (DTE2), with record sustained neutron rates, as well as plasmas for clarifying the impact of isotope mass on plasma core, edge and plasma-wall interactions, and for ITER pre-fusion power operation. The efficacy of the newly installed Shattered Pellet Injector for mitigating disruption forces and runaway electrons was demonstrated. Secondly, research on the consequences of long-term exposure to JET-ILW plasma was completed, with emphasis on wall damage and fuel retention, and with analyses of wall materials and dust particles that will help validate assumptions and codes for design & operation of ITER and DEMO. Thirdly, the nuclear technology programme aiming to deliver maximum technological return from operations in D, T and D-T benefited from the highest D-D neutron yield in years, securing results for validating radiation transport and activation codes, and nuclear data for ITER.

This paper summarizes the physical principles behind the novel three-ion scenarios using radio frequency waves in the ion cyclotron range of frequencies (ICRF). We discuss how to transform mode conversion electron heating into a new flexible ICRF technique for ion cyclotron heating and fast-ion generation in multi-ion species plasmas. The theoretical section provides practical recipes for selecting the plasma composition to realize three-ion ICRF scenarios, including two equivalent possibilities for the choice of resonant absorbers that have been identified. The theoretical findings have been convincingly confirmed by the proof-of-principle experiments in mixed H–D plasmas on the Alcator C-Mod and JET tokamaks, using thermal 3He and fast D ions from neutral beam injection as resonant absorbers. Since 2018, significant progress has been made on the ASDEX Upgrade and JET tokamaks in H–4He and H–D plasmas, guided by the ITER needs. Furthermore, the scenario was also successfully applied in JET D–3He plasmas as a technique to generate fusion-born alpha particles and study effects of fast ions on plasma confinement under ITER-relevant plasma heating conditions. Tuned for the central deposition of ICRF power in a small region in the plasma core of large devices such as JET, three-ion ICRF scenarios are efficient in generating large populations of passing fast ions and modifying the q-profile. Recent experimental and modeling developments have expanded the use of three-ion scenarios from dedicated ICRF studies to a flexible tool with a broad range of different applications in fusion research.

Alpha particles with energies on the order of megaelectronvolts will be the main source of plasma heating in future magnetic confinement fusion reactors. Instead of heating fuel ions, most of the energy of alpha particles is transferred to electrons in the plasma. Furthermore, alpha particles can also excite Alfvénic instabilities, which were previously considered to be detrimental to the performance of the fusion device. Here we report improved thermal ion confinement in the presence of megaelectronvolts ions and strong fast ion-driven Alfvénic instabilities in recent experiments on the Joint European Torus. Detailed transport analysis of these experiments reveals turbulence suppression through a complex multi-scale mechanism that generates large-scale zonal flows. This holds promise for more economical operation of fusion reactors with dominant alpha particle heating and ultimately cheaper fusion electricity.

The aim of this paper is to numerically study the influences of the impurities on the high power hybrid discharges in the JET ITER-like wall (ILW) configuration in the DD and deuterium–tritium (DT) scenarios. Numerical simulations with the COREDIV code of hybrid discharges with 32 MW auxiliary heating, 2.2 MA plasma current and 2.8 T toroidal magnetic field in the ILW corner configuration are presented. In the simulations five impurity species are used: intrinsic: beryllium (Be) and nickel (Ni) from the side walls, helium (He) from DT reaction, tungsten (W) from divertor and extrinsic neon (Ne) or argon (Ar) by gas puff. The extrapolation of the DD discharges to DT plasmas at the original input power of 32 MW and taking into account only the thermal component of the alpha-power, does not show any significant difference regarding the power to the target with respect to the DD case. Simulations show that sputtering due to D and T is negligible. In contrast, the simulations at auxiliary heating 39 MW show that the power to the target is possibly too high to be sustained for about 5 s by strike-point sweeping alone without any control by Ne seeding. The tungsten is produced mainly by Ni, Be and seeded impurities.

Density peaking has been studied between an ICRH and NBI identity plasma in JET. The comparison shows that 8MW of NBI heating/fueling increases the density peaking by a factor of two, being R/Ln=0.45 for the ICRH pulse and R/Ln=0.93 for the NBI one averaged radially over ρtor=0.4‒0.8. The dimensionless profiles of q, ρ*, υ*, βn and Ti/Te≈1 were matched within 5% difference except in the central part of the plasma (ρtor<0.3). The difference in the curvature pinch (same q-profile) and thermo-pinch (Ti=Te) between the ICRH and NBI discharges is virtually zero. Both the gyro-kinetic simulations and integrated modelling strongly support the experimental result where the NBI fuelling is the main contributor to the density peaking for this identity pair. It is to be noted here that the integrated modeling does not reproduce the measured electron density profiles, but approximately reproduces the difference in the density profiles between the ICRH and NBI discharge. Based on these modelling results and the analyses, the differences between the two pulses in impurities, fast ions, toroidal rotation and radiation do not cause any such changes in the background transport that would invalidate the experimental result where the NBI fuelling is the main contributor to the density peaking. This result of R/Ln increasing by a factor of 2 per 8MW of NBI power is valid for the ITG dominated low power H-mode plasmas. However, some of the physics processes influencing particle transport, like rotation, turbulence and fast ion content scale with power, and therefore, the simple scaling on the role of the NBI fuelling in JET is not necessarily the same under higher power conditions or in larger devices.