Hello all, something that has puzzled me for a while, is if you had a glass of water which only used tritium isotpe of hydrogen, would the water be observably different? ie: more viscous?

Cheers

Using tritium isotopes will increase the molar mass of the water molecules, but not sure what are the physical changes in appearance. As a guess based on no previous calculations or experiments, probably the covalent hydrogen bonding between the water molecules would change too I repeat it's only a guess!

isn't tritium radioactive?

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Damien,
International Baccalaureate Physics teacher
Optics, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Instrumentation Major
Admin: Pacific Science and Art

The water would be 22% denser. I expect that it would have a different specific heat, slightly higher viscosity, a higher boiling point, a higher freezing point, and it would glow bright blue.

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sounds like the Alice Springs town supply!

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Damien,
International Baccalaureate Physics teacher
Optics, Photogrammetry and Remote Sensing Instrumentation Major
Admin: Pacific Science and Art

Hey Antoniseb! Could you please elaborate on your predictions of the physical properties of fully tritiated water? Would it be stable in the first place? tritium is already radioactive as it is. HOT normally exists but Im not aware of fully tritiated water.

It would be expensive to make fully tritiated water, but it could be done.
Each tritium atom has a half-life of a little over twelve years. So any one water molecule you made that way would probably last about six years before turning into a Tritiated Hydroxyl ion, an He3 +1 ion, a free electron, and a gamma ray.

Each tritium atom is just like a normal Hydrogen as far as it's electron cloud goes. As far as chemical bonding goes, the electron clouds don't know or care what the nuclei might do in 10^23 femtoseconds. The've got plenty of time to stablize.

My predictions were based on the increased mass of the molecule, and the change of it's vibration modes with the heavier units at the end of the bonds.

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Hope that would be helpful for all

Tritium is a radioactive isotope of Hydrogen which has an atomic mass of 3. It undergoes a beta emission to give a helium nucleus of mass 3; moreover, it has a half life of 12.26 years. Tritium, sometimes referred to as "T", is produced in a number of ways, including the bombardment of deuterium compounds with high-energy deutrons and by the absorption of neutrons by the lithium isotope of mass 6.

Some tritium is produced in the upper levels of the atmosphere by the bombardment of nitrogen with energetic neutrons produced by cosmic rays; rain water is usually found to contain minute amounts of tritium. The enormous amount of energy released when tritons react with deuterons in the so-called nuclear fusion process makes tritium an important constituent of hydrogen bombs.

Almost all the hydrogen in water has an atomic mass of 1. In 1932, the presence of small amounts of so-called heavy water (1 particle in 600) , or deutrium oxide (D2O); has been discovered. Deuterium is the hydrogen isotope with an atomic mass of 2.
In 1951, the American Chemist Aristid Grosse discovered that naturally occuring water contains also minute traces of tritium oxide (T2O).

CCNS - Concerned Citizens for Nuclear Safety

This paper refers to tritrated water as HTO. Which sounds like a semi tritrated water.

It was interesting to read about semi - heavy water.

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