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Comment by spullara | Hacker News Reader

A US gallon of deuterium water costs roughly $2,600 to $3,800, while a gallon of pure tritium water (super-heavy water) would cost about $44 million.

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How much volume is that for the rest of the world? Really unscientific article.

   0.0001587302 hogsheads
   256 tablespoons
   231 cubic inches

Wouldn't 256 in proper tablespoons be 3840 ml?

why do you consider the cubic inches will be useful to the rest of the world (world who does not use galons)?

Yeah, they should have stopped at hogsheads, which is a well understood quantity worldwide.

Without cubic furlongs I don't have a good intuition for the amount

Unless you're actually measuring something with any importance, a gallon is about 4 liters. More closely 3.78541... But saying a quart and a liter are about equal is often good enough.

As long as you also know a gallon is 4.0… quarts

quart = quarter ... gallon

Wait till we learn what a fifth is!

That one I know: it's 750ml

And five of them is 1% less than a gallon.

Just think of the largest container of ranch dressing that you’ve ever seen in a grocery store. It’s that much.

To be honest, if you live outside of the US the answer to that is more likely to be a liter (or less) than a gallon.

In that case you can imagine the biggest container of ranch dressing you’ve ever seen in a grocery store, a gallon is a few of those

I get your point but unless you actually need tritium water the number still means nothing lol.

1 gallon is 0.832674 gallons. Or 1 gallon is 1.20095 gallons.

Makes me want to go to the ocean and start filtering out water somehow.

You can centrifuge it. Heavier molecules move closer to the bottom. Repeat until you reach the desired purity.

You need shitloads of ordinary water to extract a liter of heavy water. And I'd be surprised if there's any superheavy water in that, because tritium radioactively decays.

Fun fact: Heavy water is slightly toxic to humans. If you only drank heavy water, you'd die as it shifts the chemical reactions in your body out of balance. A moderate amount is fine though.

Emphasis on the slightly. I believe it would take weeks of only consuming heavy water. You could certainly drink a single glass of it without ill effects.

IIR, a number of rich & famous people have developed severe mercury poisoning after extended conspicuous consumption of swordfish and other very expensive/very contaminated seafood.

Obviously the luxury bottled water industry is missing out on the potential of D2O and T2O.

they're making medicines now with deuterium to alter the half-life

Deuterium or tritium? Deuterium is a stable isotope and does not decay.

Probably deuterium. Half-life doesn't only mean radioactive decay, it also means the rate at which a medication is broken down or excreted from the body. Tritium is more likely to be used as a radioactive tracer.

Another fun fact - heavy water has a sweet taste.

How did someone ever figure this one out?

Probably by drinking it. As I said, it's only slightly toxic. Cody's Lab has done it on YouTube. 0.01% of the normal water you drink is heavy water.

There are a variety of ways to do it, but you'd want to be careful that you don't attract attention from your local nuclear regulatory agency.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heavy_water#Production_methods

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