What happens, if you drink a glass of Heavy water ? 🧐🧐

  A refreshing glass of cold water.  If you think I'm talking about H2O, then you're right.

But our thinking is if we could be sipping on heavy water or Deuterium Oxide (D2O)  then what happened? First of all, it's super expensive, and we have to buy it from the lab.

Deuterium is a form of hydrogen or isotope, with an extra neutron, which makes it twice as heavy as regular hydrogen. That's why when there's Deuterium in water molecules.  it's about 10% heavier and we call it "Heavy Water".

In small amounts, heavy water is fine. In fact, in combination with an oxygen isotope, it's used in lots of nutrition experiments in humans because it's a useful way to track how much energy we're spending.

But,

too much will almost kill us.

If we push Deuterium oxide in rats,  they will die.  In fact, plants will stop growing.

The toxicity is related to what's called the KINETIC ISOTOPE effect.

In the incident of heavy water, the bonds between Deuterium and Oxygen are stronger than the bonds between Hydrogen and Oxygen in normal water.

That indicates it takes more energy to break those bonds, which slows everything down.

It can say that anything more than 10% of your total water intake could start causing problems.

But, there is a form of "Heavy Water" which is Tritium Oxide or super heavy water.

Tritium is also an isotope of hydrogen that contains 2 neutrons and it is radioactive.

Tritium oxide is pretty weak, it emits low energy Beta particles, that can't penetrate the skin. If we drink them, then it will enter.

There's some evidence that once inside the body Beta particles are even better-causing cancer than the higher energy gamma rays that come from things like radioactive compounds like Radium.

Tritiated water is basically used in nuclear reactors.

So, if you want to take some weird experiments like drinking heavy water.

Then experiment with Deuterium oxide by taking a little bit amount but not Tritium Oxide.

Nadeem Abdullah

Dept. Of Chemistry

University Of Rajshahi