Disruption avoidance through active magnetic feedback in tokamak plasmas

Disruptions avoidance and mitigation is a fundamental need for a fusion relevant tokamak. In this paper a new experimental approach for disruption avoidance using active magnetic feedback is presented. This scheme has been implemented and tested on the RFX-mod device operating as a circular tokamak. RFX-mod has a very complete system designed for active mode control that has been proved successful for the stabilization of the Resistive Wall Modes (RWMs). In particular the current driven 2/1 mode, unstable when the edge safety factor, qa, is around (or even less than) 2, has been shown to be fully and robustly stabilized. However, at values of qa (qa \textgreater 3), the control of the tearing 2/1 mode has been proved difficult. These results suggested the idea to prevent disruptions by suddenly lowering qa to values around 2 where the tearing 2/1 is converted to a RWM. Contrary to the universally accepted idea that the tokamaks should disrupt at low qa, we demonstrate that in presence of a well designed active control system, tokamak plasmas can be driven to low qa actively stabilized states avoiding plasma disruption with practically no loss of the plasma internal energy.