hi everyone, welcome back to Cody's Lab
so over here in the background you can see a bottle of Deuterium Oxide
or, otherwise known as "heavy water"
deuterium is basically the same as hydrogen, but instead of just being a proton, it also contains a neutron
the neutron doesn't change its chemical reactivity all that much
but it does about double the mass of the atom
and when you make water using pure deuterium, it makes it slightly heavier
by about 10%
which means you could actually get an ice cube made of frozen "heavy water" and it will sink in normal water
now, I recently purchased this because
back when I was isolating heavy water on my own,
I eventually isolated a sample which I believe was relatively pure heavy water
and I ended up tasting it
hopefully it's not salty, and also, heavy water is supposed to taste slightly sweet
so let's go ahead and get a taste of that
Well, it's not salty!
and, it does taste a little bit sweet!
now, I'm not entirely sure if it tasted sweet because heavy water intrisically tastes sweet
as I've heard from many people, or if, it was the fact that the
lead electrodes that I was using to electrolyze the water to purify it into heavy water
was a contaminant and I was tasting the sugar of Lead
which, is not particularly good
but, the amount I got was obviously not enough to give any sort of poisoning
also I plan to do some neutron activation experiments, and
heavy water is the best thing you can possibly have to slow down neutrons
and in order to produce this quantity it would take me literally years.
so I figured I would save a little bit of time and
get a little bit extra so I can produce those videos sooner
but;
the main purpose of this video is I would like to taste this
and see if it actually does taste the same as what I had originally produced.
so I'm opening this, for the first time here, this bottle looks very nice.
I almost hate to even open it
but, I really wanna know what it tastes like.
so lets crack this seal
and open this heavy water
now, heavy water is technically toxic.
but only in large quantities
you see,
heavy water, deuterium oxide, does form naturally.
Normally deuterium is very rare
existing only about 1 in every 6 or 7 thousand hydrogen atoms.
which means this tank behind me would contain roughly 20mL worth of heavy water.
Its only if you replace more than
about twenty percent of the water in your body with heavy water
before it starts becoming toxic
because the deuterium
the heavy hydrogen
chemical reactions
happen a little bit slower
and so if you get too much of it
chemical reactions in your body may not work properly
so, let's
get me a little drinking cup
here
how about a fresh test tube
so I got my clean test tube here
lets take some of this heavy water
and pour it in
let's take
about yey much, that looks like
5ml or so?
okay
so now, I know a lot of you guys may ask if heavy water is radioactive
and it is not
even though if it was, the radiation probably wouldn't make it through the glass but
this heavy water has not been in a reactor so I wouldn't expect it to be radioactive anyway.
It may contain a little bit extra
tritium than normal water would
because
the concentration process would probably also concentrate the tritium
but the amounts that are here are still negligible,
so, I'm not really worried about radiation from it.
tritium is hydrogen just like deuterium is
but instead of just one extra neutron
it has two extra neutrons so there's
three different nucleons in the nucleus
of the atom which is why they call it
tritium for "three"
tritium is radioactive, in fact it's very radioactive
I have some little phosphor coated glass tubes that have
some tritium gas inside of them and
that's what I used in the intro to this video
the radiation actually makes them
produce light which is pretty awesome
the smell
smells just like water
there's no real difference there
it's not significantly heavy enough that
I could tell any difference from
sloshing around so let's give it a taste
okay
it actually does taste sweet
and about the same as that sample that I had back
when I was isolating it myself
that's a good sign it means it wasn't actually lead
that's cool
the water does taste a little bit sweet
it's almost like
you know how hay or grass the sweetness
if you take some of that and chew on it
it's almost like that
it's got, like, that slight musky flavor to it as well
well that's interesting
so I've roughly doubled my concentration of deuterium in my body
which shouldn't be harmful at all
like I said before that even if I drink this
entire thing I would likely still be
completely fine that was roughly
five or ten dollars worth of deuterium oxide I drank there
so it's not super expensive, but it's still
you know
an entire bottle cost over a hundred dollars
ok so here i am 24 hours later and
obviously I'm not dead
in fact I been doing quite well I
haven't exhibited any signs of radiation
poisoning or anything like that so I
think I'm good one thing I have been
doing is I've been saving my urine
because it will contain a higher
concentration of deuterium probably for
the next week or so and I thought I
might as well save it I'll probably
distill it off and add it to my
electrolyzer if I ever tried to produce
massive amounts of hydrogen again so the
heavy water had a very obvious sweet
taste to it the musty taste
that i mentioned is probably possibly
due to the fact this water has been
sitting in this jar for who knows how
long and maybe it's got a little bit
stagnant but it definitely tasted
sweet to me
now the question is is that just like
some placebo effect
no I know how strong a placebo effect
could be maybe it's because I heard that
it was sweet and then my taste is my
brains just making it sweet so I'm gonna
do a little test here so i have two test
tubes one with heavy water and one was
just normal distilled water now I'm
going to see if Canyon can tell them
apart so Canyon wanna come taste some of this
- oh, alright
see if you can tell which one's the heavy water, can you sit over there - over there
- I'm gonna hurt your plant ok
okay
-so just taste them
[whispered] don't drink too much, just in case it's radioactive
what? - just in case it's radioactive huh
- alright
- well this tasted like water
- yeah that tastes sweet and that's the heavy water
- I got it right? you did
so it does seem that heavy water does have a different taste to it
the question is why why would it
actually have a different taste
why would that be sweet
do your tastebuds have like have a diffusion like the water
going in and out and it's slightly
different with the heavy water because
of the higher mass? because is really the only
difference is the mass of each particle so
- I don't know man but it's definitely sweet
so it's definitely sweet huh
so this means that either heavy water is
actually sweet or the source i got it
from somehow has a contamination that
causes very sweet and it was the same
with both my process and the
girdler-sulfide process - so what, lead
no, they
the girdler-sulfide process would it wouldn't
have any lead anywhere in the system
but my electrolysis did and lead I think
it's the only thing that would be
potentially sweet so my guess is
heavy water does actually tastes sweet
Canyon had no idea which of these tubes had the
heavy water but she was able to
determine which one it was almost
immediately on tasting it so that tells
me that heavy water does have some
difference in taste so I've tasted this
a few more times and I've got a pretty
good idea of how it tastes and it
definitely has a slight aftertaste to it
i didn't mention earlier and also it
feels cold on my lips now at first I
thought that was because it was actually
cold but now that I've compared it to
the just plain distilled water it didn't
really have that it's a subtle
difference but it's still there
the coldness to it that that was kind of
surprised me because i would expect it
to be you maybe feel even slightly
warmer because it has a slower
evaporation you know it's the
evaporation that carries away energy and
makes it feel cold
but when i put some of this on my skin I
do the same with the normal water and
blow on the back of my hand
the heavy water spot feels slightly
colder now maybe this is also something
in my head but I'm thinking that it's
not and I think I have a theory as to
why this might be you see heavy water
having higher mass per molecule it takes
more energy to get it to evaporate which
you'd think would make it evaporates
slower but there's other things than
just the vapor pressure that cause
liquid to evaporate such as surface area
and how dry the air around it is
possibly if those two effects are more
significant it would make the
evaporation rates about the same but the
heavy water would be carrying away
more energy making it feel colder
yeah just another little thing I've
noticed from doing this experiment
there's definitely a lot more research
that could be done here and I'm frankly
surprised it hasn't been done doing a
google search on this I find very
conflicting results but yeah so I want
to try one more experiment see I have a
ice tray here with some ice in it
this one is regular water ice normal tap
water in fact and tastes just like ice
should now this piece over here is some
heavy water ice so that's a still taste
noticeably sweet doesn't seem to taste
as sweet though it's almost like maybe
my sense of taste is dulled from the cold
probably it actually tastes rather good
though
ok so there you go
see they're both at their melting point
because I've held them out for a little while
yeah ice cube and feels very cold heavy
water ice cube still feels cold but
maybe slightly warmer which would make
sense
this is interesting can actually touch
the ice with the deuterated so dry my
fingers off and I add the deuterated water
to my skin I'm going to touch this ice
cube and sticks right to it because the
deuterium free water freezes
ok so here's an ice cube and its melting
point fingers off get some heavy water
going stick to it
normally it doesn't do that that's cool
like that usually in order to get that
happen the ice cube has to be colder than
the melting point but since it's at the
melting point is colder than the melting
point of the heavy water if I do the
same some normal water no result they
did it with the heavy water freeze
oh, that's cool, it sticks strongly too
hope y'all enjoyed I'll see you next time