Is Heavy Water Poisonous?

[sao123]

Heavy Water is made from Hydrogen atoms with one or more neutrons in the nucleas. Also known ass Deuterium or Triterium.
What might happen if one were to drink a glass of heavy water?
Is it poison? Would it be biochemically disruptive to the processes of the body?

How much of naturally occuring water (by volume) is heavy?
How much more would 1 gallon of distilled heavy water weigh than 1 gallon of distilled light water?

 

[Farmer]

http://yarchive.net/med/heavy_water.html

 

[Gibsons]

According to my Merck manual (11th edition), D2O has a melting point of 3.82C and boiling point of 101.42 Molecular weight is 20.028 vs 18.016 for water, so D2O should weigh around 11% more than H2O for any given volume. D2O also has "very slightly smaller" surface tension and a viscosity that's 1.23 times higher. It doesn't have a similar entry for T2O.

In biochemical reactions, I would expect both to behave nearly identically to normal water - you might slow down some reactions a little due to the slower motion of heavier nuclei (note the higher viscosity), but the electrons are still the same.

I don't know how much D2O is present in 'normal' water. Tritium would be extremely rare though, as it decays (half life is 12 years) and so is only available in quantity from artificial sources (bombarding Li6 with neutrons).

I don't think either is really poisonous in a biochemical sense, but Tritiated water would be very bad for you (lethal with a high enough dose) because it's radioactive.

 

[Wuzup101]

IIRC D2O only makes up a fraction of a percent of all the water on the planet. T2O amounts are only trace. I could give you the exact percentages, but I'm at home for break w/o my chem books. T2O would be lethal if you drank a pure glass (I'm guessing). It's radioactive, and that would be a ton of radiation. D2O does exist in the body, I'm not sure about drinking a glass of it though. From what I know about organic chemistry D2O acts much like H2O, so it might not be so bad, but I'm not all that sure.

 

[boatillo]

If we lived in the Stargate universe you could power defense shields and stuff with that heavy water Coooolies

 

[dkozloski]

When Neils Bohr was sneaked out of occupied Denmark by the British at the beginning of WWII he had to leave behind the only bottle of heavy water available to the allied forces. British commandos were flown into Denmark to retreive it. He had hidden it in his basement in a beer bottle alongside his home brew beer. The commandos were instructed to uncap the bottles and taste the contents to find the right one. The report from the commando team was that Bohr made some damn good home brew and the pleasure was all theirs. No one died.

 

[Bulldozer2003]

Is it possiblt to create heavy water in any form at home? I suppose not as it is a nuclear reaction, not chemical. I guess I'll take heart I can make ozone at home.

 

[silverpig]

Apparently an experiment was done and the test animal (rabbit I assume) was kept alive until ~80% of its body water was replaced with pure heavy water.

I can't remember the specifics, but I do know a test was done, there was an animal involved, it died, but it was fine until a rather large portion of its body water was replaced.

 

[Farmer]

dkozloski:

Right, but you can't drink gallons and gallons of heavy water.

 

[KalTorak]

If you've got a centrifuge at home, sure - you could separate it from light water that way...
Boil it and use gaseous diffusion - that would work, too...

 

[jagec]

Originally posted by: dkozloski
When Neils Bohr was sneaked out of occupied Denmark by the British at the beginning of WWII he had to leave behind the only bottle of heavy water available to the allied forces. British commandos were flown into Denmark to retreive it. He had hidden it in his basement in a beer bottle alongside his home brew beer. The commandos were instructed to uncap the bottles and taste the contents to find the right one. The report from the commando team was that Bohr made some damn good home brew and the pleasure was all theirs. No one died.

lol...could they just have smelled it?

Maybe that's what the commanders told them to do, but they couldn't resist a few mugs of the stuff...