Tritium Assembly (TSTA) was a facility at the Los Alamos National Laboratory dedicated to the development and demonstration of technologies required for fusion-relevant deuterium-tritium processing. Tritium is sometimes used as a radiolabel. It has the advantage that almost all organic chemicals contain hydrogen, making it easy to find a place to put tritium on the molecule under investigation. It has the disadvantage of producing a comparatively weak signal. Tritium can be used in a betavoltaic device to create an atomic battery to generate electricity. Aside from chlorofluorocarbons, tritium can act as a transient tracer and has the ability to "outline" the
Tritium tritium on the Earth's surface; but these amounts rose by 2 or 3 orders of magnitude during the post-test period. Some sources reported natural background levels were exceeded by approximately 1,000 TU in 1963 and 1964 and the isotope is used in the northern hemisphere to estimate the age of groundwater and construct hydrogeologic simulation models. Recent scientific sources have estimated atmospheric levels at the height of weapons testing to approach 1,000 TU and pre-fallout levels of rainwater to be between 5 and 10 TU. In 1963 Valentia Island Ireland recorded 2,000 TU in precipitation. While in the stratosphere (post-test