Review of neutral beam heating on JET for physics experiments and the production of high fusion performance plasmas

Abstract The JET neutral beam injection system has proved to be both effective and reliable as a plasma heating device. The ion heating and plasma fuelling characteristics of the system are ideally suited to the production of high fusion performance plasmas while the flexibility in the choice of beam species (H, D, T, 3 He or 4 He) and the ability to inject into almost any JET plasma configuration allows a wide variety of related physics experiments to be carried out. The capability to inject (for the first time) tritium beams was essential to the successful execution of the first tritium experiments in which 1.7 MW of power from DT fusion reactions was generated.