An optical spectroscopy diagnostic has been designed to observe emissions from the nonthermal alpha particle population that will be generated during the D-T operation phase on TFTR. The system will observe spectral line emission near 469 nm from the slowing-down alpha population interacting with the heating neutral beams through charge exchange. The required spectrometer throughput and resolution are obtained by modification of a simple commercial spectrometer system, while a series of measurements indicate that a cooled CCD array is usable as a high-efficiency detector with photon-noise-limited accuracy to roughly a part in 10(4).