How will the actively cooled tungsten components of the ITER divertor behave after hours of plasma discharge? Can performant plasmas be produced if plasma facing components are damaged ? How can the monitoring system be optimized for these components? These are some of the questions that will be given priority by the teams of the WEST Project for securing and facilitating the use of ITER’s future divertor.
In addition to the questions linked to the divertor components, WEST will enable its teams to explore the issues involved in plasma physics over long periods of time in a tungsten environment thanks to its unique capacities concerning its pulse durations.