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
Radioactive tracer atomic nucleus of an isotope is unstable, compounds containing this isotope are radioactive. Tritium is an example of a radioactive isotope. The principle behind the use of radioactive tracers is that an atom in a chemical compound is replaced by another atom, of the same chemical element. The substituting atom, however, is a radioactive isotope. This process is often called radioactive labeling. The power of the technique is due to the fact that radioactive decay is much more energetic than chemical reactions. Therefore, the radioactive isotope can be present in low concentration and its presence detected by sensitive radiation detectors