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.