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 the fission reaction in the fissionable core (pit) of the bomb, after it is compressed to a critical mass by explosives. Actuated by an ultrafast switch like a krytron, a small particle accelerator drives ions of tritium and deuterium to energies above the 15 keV or so needed for deuterium-tritium fusion and directs them into a metal target where the tritium and deuterium are adsorbed as hydrides. High-energy fusion neutrons from the resulting fusion radiate in all directions. Some of these strike plutonium or uranium nuclei in the primary's pit, initiating nuclear chain reaction. The quantity of neutrons produced is