Argonne’s Program in Heavy Ion Fusion

Abstract

Argonne is constructing the initial part of a xenon accelerator which could serve as the driver for an Inertial Confinement Fusion power plant. The project consists of a Xe source, a 1.5 Mv Dynamitron preaccelerator, independently phased rf cavities as a low β linac, and Wideroe linac at 12.5 and 25 MHz. The beam will be injected at 220 MeV into a circular ring to its space charge limit, transferred to a second ring for multiturn injection after an x-y rotation, extracted, compressed in time duration, transported and focussed onto foil targets. The project thus will demonstrate nearly all of the beam manipulations involved in a full scale ICF driver. The feasibility of accelerating in the accumulator ring to 10 GeV to achieve adequate beam energy to permit energy deposition experiments in hot plasma is being studied. The status and future plans of this project are discussed.

Work supported by the U.S. Department of Energy