[DBrow]

Heavy water won't hurt you at all, the chemical differences are minute. You could drink a gallon of it and not even burp, which you can't say about Coke.

There is no such thing as "depleted deuterium", though. There's "depleted uranium" in which the U235 has been taken out (leaving the remaining U238 depleted in 235). But the same language does not apply to deuterium.

I think he's correct about research reactors, though- if you had lots of heavy water, it would make a better reactor than regular water.

The Nazis were following the D2O path to a reactor in The War To End All Wars, which is why the allies spent so much effort in trying to destroy the Norwegian plant that all of their D2O came from.

But depleted deuterium?

[cartan]

Heavy water won't hurt you at all, the chemical differences are minute. You could drink a gallon of it and not even burp, which you can't say about Coke.

Just make it really heavy and mix in some Tritium…

[ahayes]

While the difference seems insignificant, I wouldn't go drinking a lot of it daily. D2O has slightly different chemical properties than H2O because of isotope effects. Since water is the major solvent in our bodies and since it is involved in enzymes shuttling protons around, organisms treated with large amounts of D2O have abnormal physiological processes. Rats given only D2O to drink eventually die. It just seems like a Bad Idea to me.

[Abathar]

"One of the products of heavy water is depleted deuterium"

LOL! I guess they mean that the atom gave up its neutron, so its back to a just plain old hydrogen atom, you know, WATER.....

[Wonder Warthog]

"Heavy water won't hurt you at all, the chemical differences are minute. You could drink a gallon of it and not even burp, which you can't say about Coke."

I don't know about that. I suspect if you drank enough D2O that it would screw up a lot of your enzyme kinetics.

"There is no such thing as "depleted deuterium", though. There's "depleted uranium" in which the U235 has been taken out (leaving the remaining U238 depleted in 235). But the same language does not apply to deuterium."

And this is simply wrong. "depleted deuterium" is simply plain old water with the 0.015% of natural deuterium removed--exactly like "depleted uranium" is natural uranium with the U-235 fraction remeoved. The expression is unusual, but not incorrect.