The Heating Systems of the future European DEMOnstration Fusion Power Plant

The EU DEMO Project is organized in Work Packages aimed to develop and design the different systems necessary to complete the Conceptual Design of the European Power Plant Tokamak (DEMO). A particular attention is dedicated to the Heating and Current Drive Systems (HCD) in order to design the systems capable to initiate, control and ramp down the burning phase of a fusion reactor. The foreseen systems presently under development ar e Neutral Beam Injector (NBI), Electron Cyclotron Resonant Heating (ECRH) and Ion Cyclotron Resonant Heating (ICRH). For each of them, a design reference value for the power to be delivered to plasma is 50 MW, even if a final target has not yet been defin ed, depending on the final physical requirements assigned to each of the systems. In all three HCD systems an effort to extrapolate present technological requirement (as those for ITER) to the specific environment of a nuclear fusion plant is on going. In particular the effort is mainly dedicated to a strong R&D activity to develop technologies to improve the efficiency and to maximize the RAMI of each system. Among them an advanced gyrotron (power up to 2 MW, efficiency 60%, with frequency step tunability) for ECRH, caesium - free negative ion source and a photo - neutralization system for NBI and finally a distributed antenna for ICRH to maximize the coupling and the transfer of energy. The integration of the 3 systems in the DEMO machine is also the focus o f the program . The status of the DEMO HCD project will be highlighted and described, giving an overview of the possibility for the development of new technologies in the highly challenging field of nuclear fusion.