Posted by: SteveInCO | 01 Apr 2012






Fusion nuclear

The three types of hydrogen.  (Yeah, it’s a foreign language diagram but science is true everywhere.)

As you can see from the above diagram, there is also a two neutron configuration called tritium but it’s off topic for this post.

Deuterium makes up about one hydrogen atom out of every 6,420 or so, and it is believed that most deuterium that is around today was made during the Big Bang.  This is because, even though it’s stable (not radioactive) it’s fragile and will break up easily under the conditions deep in the cores of stars–or be consumed as part of the chain of events that fuses hydrogen into helium, which is what powers most stars including our sun.

A pyhsical proton proton chain

A physical proton proton chain (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

We have plenty of hydrogen on earth, but it’s not in the form of elemental hydrogen gas.  Rather, much of it is bound with oxygen in water molecules, two atoms of hydrogen for every one atom of oxygen, H2O.  And some of that hydrogen will be deuterium.  Of course most of the time only one of the two hydrogen atoms is deuterium.

Physicists can concentrate the deuterium-bearing water, and ultimately get large quantities of deuterium oxide, heavy water, or D2O.  Instead of having a mass of 16 (from the oxygen) plus 2 (for the two protium atoms) = 18, it ends up with a mass of 16 + 4 = 20.

I mentioned chemical differences.  Well one chemical difference is that heavy water has stronger “hydrogen bonds” between the molecules than regular water does–the strength of the bond ultimately depends on the mass of the nucleus of the hydrogen atom–and thus it takes more energy to break those bonds to melt and boil heavy water.  Instead of melting at 0 degrees Celsius (32F) it melts at 3.8C or 39F, and it boils at 101C or 214F (instead of 100C/212F).  (Of course that boiling point applies down in the swamplands at sea level, not up here in the high plains and mountains.)

This difference is highlighted in this video from Thunderf00t:

In the video, note that he demonstrated by experiment (so even a Creationist can’t deny it!) that heavy water ice is heaver than regular (protium oxide) water, rather than being lighter.  It is of course still lighter than liquid heavy (deuterium oxide) water.

I hope you found this interesting; if not well then

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  1. LOL,You got me!!! but it was an interesting post, and deuterium kinda sounds like Dueteronomy. Happy April Fools day :-)

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