Fast wave current drive in DEMO

The ability to non-inductively drive a large fraction of the toroidal plasma current in magnetically confined plasmas is an essential requirement for steady state fusion reactors such as DEMO. Besides neutral beam injection (NBI), electron-cyclotron resonance heating (ECRH) and lower hybrid wave heating (LH), ion-cyclotron resonance heating (ICRH) is a promising candidate to drive current, in particular at the high temperatures expected in fusion plasmas. In this paper, the current drive (CD) efficiencies calculated with coupled ICRF wave / CD numerical codes for the DEMO-1 design case (R0=9m, B0=6.8T, ap=2.25m) [1] are presented. It will be shown that although realistic CD efficiencies can be obtained in the usual ICRF frequency domain (20-100MHz) by shifting the dominant ion-cyclotron absorption layers to the high-field side, operation at higher frequencies (100-300MHz) has a stronger CD potential, provided the parasitic RF power absorption of the alpha particles can be minimized.