A future fusion reactor is expected to have all-metal plasma facing materials (PFM) to ensure low erosion rates, low tritium retention and stability against high neutron fluences. As a consequence, intrinsic radiation losses in the plasma edge and divertor are low in comparison to devices with carbon PFMs. To avoid localized overheating in the divertor, intrinsic low-Z and medium-Z impurities have to be inserted into the plasma to convert a major part of the power flux into radiation and to facilitate partial divertor detachment. For burning plasma conditions in ITER, which operates not far above the L-H threshold power, a high divertor radiation level will be mandatory to avoid thermal overload of divertor components. Moreover, in a prototype reactor, DEMO, a high main plasma radiation level will be required in addition for dissipation of the much higher alpha heating power. For divertor plasma conditions in present day tokamaks and in ITER, nitrogen appears most suitable regarding its radiative characteristics. If elevated main chamber radiation is desired as well, argon is the best candidate for simulataneous enhancement of core and divertor radiation, provided sufficient divertor compression can be obtained. The parameter P sep /R, the power flux through the separatrix normalized by the major radius, is suggested as a suitable scaling (for a given electron density) for the extrapolation of present day divertor conditions to larger devices. The scaling for main chamber radiation from small to large devices has a higher, more favourable dependence of about P rad,main /R 2 . Krypton provides the smallest fuel dilution for DEMO conditions, but has a more centrally peaked radiation profile compared to argon. For investigation of the different effects of main chamber and divertor radiation and for optimization of their distribution, a double radiative feedback system has been implemented in ASDEX Upgrade. About half the ITER/DEMO values of P sep /R have been achieved so far, and close to DEMO values of P rad,main /R 2 , albeit at lower P sep /R. Further increase of this parameter may be achieved by increase of the neutral pressure or improved divertor geometry.

H modes with good confinement and small ELMs with the characteristics of type II or grassy ELMs have been observed on ASDEX Upgrade. Such an ELM behaviour is essential to minimize erosion of the divertor tiles in any next step device. For the first time, operation with this favourable ELM type could be demonstrated close to the Greenwald density. Even for such high densities, energy confinement times were close to recent H mode scalings. High density even seems to be favourable, since steady state pure type II ELMy H mode phases on ASDEX Upgrade are obtained only above ne/nGW ≥ 0.85. Additional requirements are q95 ≥ 4.2 and an equilibrium close to a double null configuration with an average triangularity δ = 0.40. For these small ELMs magnetic precursors are observed with a frequency of ≈30 kHz and dominant mode numbers of toroidally 3 and 4 and poloidally ≥14.

Feedback control of the divertor power load by means of nitrogen seeding has been developed into a routine operational tool in the all-tungsten clad ASDEX Upgrade tokamak. For heating powers above about 12 MW, its use has become inevitable to protect the divertor tungsten coating under boronized conditions. The use of nitrogen seeding is accompanied by improved energy confinement due to higher core plasma temperatures, which more than compensates the negative effect of plasma dilution by nitrogen on the neutron rate. This paper describes the technical details of the feedback controller. A simple model for its underlying physics allows the prediction of its behaviour and the optimization of the feedback gain coefficients used. Storage and release of nitrogen in tungsten surfaces were found to have substantial impact on the behaviour of the seeded plasma, resulting in increased nitrogen consumption with unloaded walls and a latency of nitrogen release over several discharges after its injection. Nitrogen is released from tungsten plasma facing components with moderate surface temperature in a sputtering-like process; therefore no uncontrolled excursions of the nitrogen wall release are observed. Overall, very stable operation of the high-Z tokamak is possible with nitrogen seeding, where core radiative losses are avoided due to its low atomic charge Z and a high ELM frequency is maintained.