Nuclear fallout from Cold War weapons testing settled in the United States throughout the Mississippi River System. Tritium concentrations can be used to understand the residence times of continental hydrologic systems (as opposed to the usual oceanic hydrologic systems) which include surface waters such as lakes, streams, and rivers. Studying these systems can also provide societies and municipals with information for agricultural purposes and overall river water quality.
In a 2004 study, several rivers were taken into account during the examination of tritium concentrations (starting in the 1960s) throughout the Mississippi River Basin: Ohio River (largest input to the Mississippi River flow), Missouri River, and Arkansas River. The largest tritium concentrations were found in 1963 at all the sampled locations throughout these rivers and correlate well with the peak concentrations in precipitation due to the nuclear bomb tests in 1962. The overall highest concentrations occurred in the Missouri River (1963) and were greater than 1,200 TU while the lowest concentrations were found in the Arkansas River (never greater than 850 TU and less than 10 TU in the mid-1980s).
Several processes can be identified using the tritium data from the rivers: direct runoff and outflow of water from groundwater reservoirs. Using these processes, it becomes possible to model the response of the river basins to the transient tritium tracer. Two of the most common models are the following:
; Piston-flow approach: tritium signal appears immediately; and
; Well-mixed reservoir approach: outflow concentration depends upon the residence time of the basin water
For the Ohio River, the tritium data indicated that about 40% of the flow was composed of precipitation with residence times of less than one year (in the Ohio basin) and older waters consisted of residence times of about ten years. Thus, the short residence times (less than one year) corresponded to the "prompt-flow" component of the two-member mixing model. As for the Missouri River, results indicated that residence times were approximately four years with the prompt-flow component being around 10% (these results are due to the series of dams in the area of the Missouri River).
As for the mass flux of tritium through the main stem of the Mississippi River into the Gulf of Mexico, data indicated that approximately 780 grams of tritium has flowed out of the River and into the Gulf between 1961 and 1997, an average of 21.7 grams/yr and 7.7 PBq/yr.  Current fluxes through the Mississippi River are 1 to 2 grams, per year as opposed to the pre-bomb period fluxes of roughly 0.4 grams per year.