Recent studies provide convincing evidence that the anomalous transport in a tokamak is governed by the combination of ion temperature gradient and trapped electron mode turbulence. In this paper, we employ the theory-based transport model GLF23 to study the density profile formation in ITER. It is shown that the plasma density can be noticeably more peaked than is usually assumed. The peaking is mainly due to the curvature drift as described by the GLF model and, independently, by the turbulent equipartition theory. This results in an approximately 30% enhancement of the fusion power in comparison with the standard conjecture of the flat density profile. The physical background of this density peaking and its possible further impact on the reactor performance are also discussed.
Particle transport in tokamak plasmas, theory and experiment