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China Fusion Engineering Test Reactor (CFETR) is a tokamak reactor; one design option under the consideration of the China National Integration Design Group employs superconducting magnets. The fusion power is at the range of 50-200 MW and the duty cycle (or burning time) was envisioned as 30%-50%. The plasma current will be 10 MA and the major and minor radii are 5.7 and 1.6 m, respectively. The concept engineering design including the magnet system, vacuum vessel (VV) system, and maintenance method has been carried out in the past years. The toroidal magnetic field strength at R0 is 5 T and the maximum flux swing provided by central solenoid winding will be 160 VS. The main design work, including the electromagnetic analysis of the magnet system, has already been carried out. This paper mainly probes into the VV design and optimization based on three types of maintenance ports. Furthermore, the maintenance method, counted as one of the most important design studies, is presented specifically in this paper. It includes the design of the maintenance ports and the remote handling system design, and so on. The next design stage will mainly include mechanical design, conductor stability, different types of divertor system design, and so on.

A new technique for wall conditioning that will be especially useful for future larger superconducting tokamaks, such as ITER, has been successfully developed and encouraging results have been obtained. Solid carborane powder, which is non-toxic and non-explosive, was used. Pulsed RF plasma was produced by a non-Faraday shielding RF antenna with RF power of 10 kW. The ion temperature was about 2 keV with a toroidal magnetic field of 1.8 T and a pressure of 3 × 10-1 Pa. Energetic ions broke up the carborane molecules, and the resulting boron ions struck and were deposited on the first wall. In comparison with glow discharge cleaning boronization, the B/C coating film shows higher adhesion, more uniformity and longer lifetime during plasma discharges. The plasma performance was improved after ICRF boronization.

Lower hybrid current drive (LHCD) experiments have been done on the superconducting Tokamak HT-7 by using a new developed long pulse megawatt lower hybrid wave system. An LHCD efficiency of 0.5 × 1019 Am-2/W in a pulse length of several hundreds of milliseconds has been achieved. After boronization of the tokamak vacuum vessel, considerable improvements of plasma energy confinement and particle confinement during LHCD phase have been achieved by adjusting wave spectra. An energy transfer from the lower hybrid wave to plasma bulk electrons has been demonstrated experimentally. A computer simulation of the LHCD experiments by using a ray tracing code combined with a two dimensional Fokker-Planck code is in good accordance with experimental measurements and suggests an important role of plasma current profile.