Abstract
Recent progress in understanding of disruptions and in developing methods to avoid disruption damage is presented. Nearly complete mitigation of conducted heat loads has been achieved with high-Z gas jet shutdown. The resulting local radiation heat flash melting in the main chamber might be a concern in ITER, especially with beryllium walls. During the current quench, significant vessel forces can occur due to halo currents I-halo; however, these are found to fall reliably below a boundary of (halo current fraction times halo current peaking factor) <0.7 both experimentally and numerically. Numerical simulations indicate that runaway electrons (REs) could cause serious damage to hard-to reach components in ITER, making their suppression a high priority. During the current quench, less than 20% of the density required for collisional suppression of REs appears to have been achieved. Collisional suppression of REs may have been achieved, however, in full-current RE beams with gas injection. (C) 2010 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved.