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Comment by BizarroLand | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

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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