Overview of the APT accelerator design

The accelerator for the Accelerator Production of Tritium (APT) Project is a 100-mA continuous-wave (CW) proton linac with an output energy of 1030 or 1700 MeV, depending on the tritium-production capacity that is needed. A high-energy beam transport (HEBT) system conveys the beam to a raster expander, which provides a large-area rectangular power distribution at a target/blanket assembly. Spallation neutrons generated by the beam in the target/blanket are absorbed in helium-3 to produce tritium. The APT linac has an integrated normal-conducting (NC)/superconducting (SC) design; the machine architecture, beam dynamics, performance issues, and the supporting engineering-development-and-demonstration program have been discussed elsewhere. The NC linac consists of a 75-keV injector, a 6.7-MeV, 350-MHz radiofrequency quadrupole (RFQ), a 96-MeV, 700-MHz coupled-cavity drift-tube linac (CCDTL), and a 700-MHz coupled-cavity linac (CCL), with an output energy of 211 MeV.