Why is tritium used at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory?
At LBNL, the NTLF (Building 75 in Figure 1-1) uses tritium. The NTLF helps biomedical researchers develop new ways to study cell metabolism and test new products that can be useful in curing diseases. Researchers “label” pharmaceuticals and other materials with tritium by replacing a hydrogen atom with a tritium atom in materials used in experiments. For example, a potential cancer drug might be labeled so that researchers can study the transport of the tritium-labeled drug in a cell culture and evaluate its effectiveness in treating a particular type of cancer.
