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
Inertial confinement fusion the layer to be closely monitored ensuring its "smoothness". Cryogenic targets filled with a deuterium tritium (D-T) mixture are "self-smoothing" due to the small amount of heat created by the decay of the radioactive tritium isotope. This is often referred to as "beta-layering". Certain targets are surrounded by a small metal cylinder which is irradiated by the laser beams instead of the target itself, an approach known as ""indirect drive"". In this approach the lasers are focused on the inner side of the cylinder, heating it to a superhot plasma which radiates mostly in X-rays. The X-rays from this plasma