The initial aim of Tore Supra (TS) was to operate at a plasma current up to 1.7 MA, over 30 seconds with a heating power of at least 15MW. The first two values have been reached and even exeeded during two minutes discharges, where 3MW of lower hybrid current drive power was used. However the power exhaust limits of TS are still imposed by the characteristics of the remaining active cooled plasma facing components of old generation. On the basis of the physics results and of the technological experience gained after eight years of operation, the main motivation for the CIEL project is to enhance the capability to handle large input powers and to control the particles over long durations. Beside the foreseen upgrading of Tore Supra equipments such as cooling, pumping, heating and current drive sources, a special development effort has been carried out, in order to improve the design and fabrication of actively cooled inner vessel components.

As a result, this led to a new generation of actively cooled high heat flux components using braze free bonding technics between carbon fiber-reinforced carbon composite (CFC) tiles and a CuCrZr heat sink structure. Roughly 600 of such so called "finger" elements will be assembled to a toroidal pump limiter (TPL) structure, located on the bottom of the vacuum vessel. The TPL will be capable to remove 15 MW of convective power steadily. Tests and analysis of prototypes have shown, that these "finger" elements sustain at least an incident heat flux in the range of 10MW/m² at a surface temperature lower than 1200 C without significant damage after 3000 cycles.

As the TS vacuum vessel itself is not actively cooled, a global shielding system will be installed on the 135 m² of inner vessel structure and torus port side walls. This shielding protection will have a drastically reduced radiation transparency compared to the actual one. It will allow to remove at least 10MW of radiated power in steady state. The protection system is made of actively cooled double imbossed inflated stainless steel. A prototype panel has been successfully tested at constant heat fluxes up to 1.3 MW/m².

For plasma ramp-up and disruption protection a guard limiter made of six distinct poloidal sections will be installed on the high field side of the vacuum vessel. The principle is based on shaped CFC tiles which are mechanically attached to an actively cooled copper based heat sink structure. A former prototype assembly sustained a heat flux deposition in the range of 0.5 MW/m² in steady state at a tile surface temperature of lower than 600 C without damage. In this paper the design concept of the CIEL project (limiter and inner vessel components) is presented, development steps and thermal test results of the different protection elements are reported.