It is shown that the collisionless transformation of locally trapped and passing particle orbits in the optimized stellarators of the Wendelstein line results in stochastic diffusion of energetic ions. This diffusion can lead to the loss of a significant fraction of the energetic ion population from the region where the characteristic diffusion time is small compared to the slowing down time. The loss region and losses can be minimized by shaping the plasma temperature and density profiles so that they satisfy certain requirements. The predictions of the theory developed here are in agreement with the results of numerical modeling of α-particle confinement in a Helias reactor, which has been carried out with the use of an orbit following code.

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The Helias ignition experiment is an upgraded version of the Wendelstein 7-X experiment. The magnetic configuration is a four-period Helias configuration (major radius 18 m, plasma radius 2.0 m, B = 4.5 T), which presents a more compact option than the five-period configuration. Much effort has been focused on two versions of the four-period configuration. One option is the power reactor HSR4/18 providing at least 3 GW of fusion power and the second is the ignition experiment HSR 4/18i aiming at a minimum of fusion power and the demonstration of self-sustaining burn. The design criteria of the ignition experiment HSR 4/18i are the following: The experiment should demonstrate a safe and reliable route to ignition; self-sustained burn without external heating; steady-state operation during several hundred seconds; reliability of the technical components and tritium breeding in a test blanket. The paper discusses the technical issues of the coil system and describes the vacuum vessel and the shielding blanket. The power balance will be modelled with a transport code and the ignition conditions will be investigated using current scaling laws of energy confinement in stellarators. The plasma parameters of the ignition experiment are: peak density 2–3×1020 m−3, peak temperature 11–15 keV, average beta 3.6% and fusion power 1500–1700 MW.

It is shown that a pair of counter-propagating, tearing-parity, beta-induced Alfvén eigenmodes (BAEs) with low mode numbers can be excited in the presence of a magnetic island of the same helicity. The instability mechanism consists of the reversal of ion Landau damping due to island-induced modification of the equilibrium distribution function. This instability seems to be responsible for the BAE excitation in ohmic plasmas with tearing mode activity at the FTU tokamak (Buratti P. et al 2005 Nucl. Fusion 45 1446).

The destabilization of double kink modes by the circulating energetic ions in tokamaks with the plasma current having an off-axis maximum is studied. It is shown that the high-frequency fishbone instability [Energetic ParticleMode (EPM)] and the low-frequency (diamagnetic) fishbones are possible for such an equilibrium, their poloidal and toroidal mode numbers being not necessarily equal to unity. A new kind of the EPM instability, "doublet fishbones", is predicted. This instability is characterized by two frequencies; it can occur in a plasma with a non-monotonic radial profile of the energetic ions when the particle orbit width is less than the width of the region where the mode is localized. It is found that the diamagnetic fishbone branch exists even when the orbit width exceeds the mode width; in this case, however, the instability growth rate is relatively small.