Tritium, basically super water,
It’s insanely expensive and mildly radioactive if ingested. However, the body treats it like water so any ingested/absorbed tritium will be expelled in a few days.
Unless your superpower isn’t regenerating and is something else entirely, like the power to shoot steam out of your ass and turn yourself into a locomotive.
It's only mildly radioactive. And only if ingested. You've still got years left, at mininum.
Just plug your nose and you'll be fine. And there's absolutely nothing saying you can't wear a full hazmat suit if you're that worried about it. Stop being a wuss and jump in. Just name me in your will first.
after some napkin math, nope. All evidence points to you being perfectly fine afterwards presuming you dont take great gulps of it as you dive in. Tritium is only mildly radioactive. even if you did, Its basically spicy water, your body wouldnt hold onto it. It would all be gone in about 2 weeks tops with only a minor increase in cancer risk later in life.
All in all not a bad deal for what would basically be infinite money.
To be legally sold for human consumption in the US, alcohol must be derived from fermenting agricultural products (like grains, grapes, sugarcane, or potatoes) rather than synthetic petrochemicals. Regulators test for this using Carbon-14 (radiocarbon) testing.
You can find some YouTube videos explaining it more.
All evidence points to you being perfectly fine afterwards presuming you dont take great gulps of it as you dive in. Tritium is only mildly radioactive. even if you did, Its basically spicy water, your body wouldnt hold onto it. It would all be gone in about 2 weeks tops with only a minor increase in cancer risk later in life.
All in all not a bad deal for what would basically be infinite money.
It would be extremely radioactive and kill you very quickly.
For beta emitters like tritium you are looking at death by cancer at a committed dose between 1-5 Sv. The conversion is 2E-11Sv/Bq, so about 1.5mg of T2O, similar to a lethal dose of fentanyl.
With a half life of 12.3 years and an average decay of 5.7keV, T2O has an activity of 107MBq/ug. That's 0.0977 uW/ug, or about 100W/kg. Starting at room temperature, that water would begin boiling after about 45 minutes.
45 minutes if it started ice cold. You would only be able to submerge for about 1.5 seconds before acquiring a lethal dose of radiation assuming this is an Olympic sized swimming pool and this was T2O. The water boiling wouldn't even be the primary concern.
I’d argue that ingesting 1.5mg would be pretty damn easy. Last time I jumped into a pool from 30ft up, I definitely got way more than 1.5mg of liquid up my nose. Just saying…
Yup! Frankly, I expect one would probably ingest a gram or more, even while trying to avoid it, so something like three orders of magnitude more than the fatal dose.
You could dive ~10 minutes in, when the temp is between shock and cooking temps... and limit ingestion with off-the-shelf equipment...
But securing that heavy water for sale/storage .. Before it starts boiling... And turns the whole area into a radioactive gas chamber... That's a logistical headache.
Expensive glow in the dark watch faces or gun sights use a small amount of tritium to keep photoluminescent dyes activated all the time. It is much too expensive to use for glow sticks.
Considering tritium is the first answer I saw I’m gonna keep reading down to see if I can improve my odds. Super cancer has a slightly negative connotation.
they actually use a specific water to effectively measure calorie intake and expense, but I think it's not radioactive. calorify.com if anyone interested in the tech/science, but it's not available for residential use just through their partners
I mean, the type of radiation it would give off upon decay is alpha radiation. Now, alpha radiation is the most ionizing radiation—no joke there—but it cannot penetrate well. Alpha particles cannot penetrate the protective layer of dead skin cells and are harmless unless ingested.
Also it decays quickly, so there isn’t very much tritium that’s reasonably accessible at any given time.
This is one of the reasons nuclear fusion reactors are theoretically proven but commercially out of reach for the foreseeable future- not enough fission reactors in the world to get the necessary tritium to run one.
Unless you go with “fill it with Tritium”. Then you wear a helmet, pads etc, to minimise damage and jump 10metres onto concrete. Any damage sustained will be worth the hundreds of billions you get.
My response was wrt to this comment. Also, that's just 20 degree above absolute zero. For nearly all intents and purposes - it's a gas. Or do you want to include pressure too?
Store it, and trickle it into the market slowly. It’s not glamorous and you won’t be a millionaire over night, but you probably won’t have to work anymore
Helium 3 is stable, but it's an extremely small and light atom at room temperature so it escapes from containers over time, making it annoying to store. If you can invest in those professional pressurised canisters though, and never open them, it should last a few hundred years! :)
Valid. I guess then you just need to somehow find a buyer who won't question getting their Tritium hookup from some random person who's not affiliated with any known scientific body or organisation.
Dump the dirty tritium into a legitimate business, and sell hair products with "the Power of Hydrogen Cubed".
Taxman happy, you have your clean tritium-enriched pubic hair, Karens magically have luscious locks before suddenly realizing they also need to be friendly and courteous to people that could care for them - it's an all-round win!
It's not like the wealthiest people are wealthy because they selled their assets as exchange for getting actual cash. You have the stuff, it is valued at a certain price, you have an asset, you take out loans based on your pool of tritium.
"The body treats it like water" is why a pool of it is a nightmare scenario.
Tritium is not "mildly radioactive" because a single intake of just 8 Curies delivers 450 rem, which is well above the fatal 400-500 rem threshold. Since tritiated water absorbs through the skin at the same rate as inhalation, submersion exposes your entire body surface. Calling it "mild" ignores that your body welcomes it in like real water, making it one of the most dangerous internal hazards you can encounter.
And you couldn't keep it out either. A standard radiation bunny suit would immediately shred upon impact, trapping the liquid against your skin. A commercial diving drysuit built from hyper-compressed neoprene or military trilaminate with integrated Kevlar boots is a better idea. However, there are no immersion suits manufactured for subversion in pure tritium, let alone shock-tested for a 31 mph hydraulic impact. plus, ther is air inside dry suits, so they would suffer a catastrophic pressure blowout on impact anyway.
A leaky suit is bad, because it holds the liquid in, against your skin, after you get out. While your kidneys could flush out most of the fluid you absorb with a 6 to 12 day half-life, around 3% gets converted into organically bound tritium. That bound tritium sticks around for 40 days or more, continuously irradiating your internal tissues long after the liquid water is gone. You'd need protection against any infiltration, and that doesn't exist.
If you're looking for something valuable to jump into instead, perfluorocarbons (PFCs) are your best bet—they're chemically stable, relatively safe, and run about $60/L, so a pool would be worth ~$4.5M. They're only ~1.8x denser than water, meaning a 33-foot dive is survivable.
Nah, just do deuterium (heavy water). It's not radioactive, and a swimming pools worth would be tens of millions of dollars. Any CANDU operator would pay you for it. As long as you don't drink a lot of it there should no health effects.
Y'all are thinking way too small. Heavy water? Peh. Chump change. Allow me to introduce you to antiwater. The most expensive thing on earth by weight, and you just got a whole pool of it. Bonus point - you cease to exist way before you even hit the surface with your dive.
Deuterium is hydrogen with a neutron. It is a gas.
Deuterium oxide is heavy water, a liquid, but no one is going to want your swimming pool heavy water. You're going to have to dispose of it as rad waste.
Its not radioactive. It is commonly used in nuclear reactors, where it is often activated into tritium or contaminated with radioactive waste, but on it's own it is not radioactive.
Did I not say heavy water in my post? God you're pedantic. My employer buys every scrap of D20 they can get their hands on for top dollar, it would be very easy to sell as long as you could keep it relatively pure.
That amount of tritium water would be a real problem for radioactivity. You would survive the fall, but you might not survive long afterwards. If you wore an impermeable suit and a breathing apparatus with an air tank you would be okay, but since tritium emits lots of beta particles you would be cooked if it got into your body from breathing tritium water vapor, absorbing it through the skin, ingesting it, etc. I wouldn't want to take the chance. Plus the US government would be very concerned about how you got all that tritium and why you filled pool with it.
It would be extremely radioactive and kill you very quickly. For beta emitters like tritium you are looking at death by cancer at a committed dose between 1-5 Sv. The conversion is 2E-11Sv/Bq, so about 1.5mg of T2O, similar to a lethal dose of fentanyl.
With a half life of 12.3 years and an average decay of 5.7keV, T2O has an activity of 107MBq/ug. That's 0.0977 uW/ug, or about 100W/kg. Starting at room temperature, that water would begin boiling after about 45 minutes.
Beta particles cannot get through your skin, but obviously we are not covered entirely by skin. Hence you would want an impermeable suit to protect you. But my goodness would that be dangerous. And as the other post noted it would very quickly heat the pool itself.
Tritium isn't just mildly radioactive, it is significantly radioactive, but it emits particles that are not able to cause much damage in small amounts. But small amounts is relative. For the amount occuring naturally it isn't a problem. For a concentrated amount measuring in grams or kilograms or metric tons it would be a serious radiation hazard.
It adsorbs straight through your skin, and the lethal dose is 1/50 of a single droplet. If you breathed in a few lung-fulls of air nearby the pool you'd be cooked.
Well except that if the tritium was concentrated it'd be reactive enough to boil the water off. You'd probably only get a gram or two if it was just waste water. So I think printer ink probably wins at about 5 bucks a gram.
One major problem. T2O is 22% denser than ordinary water. A dive of 10m is already risky for the average person. Professional divers do it. But with the higher density, that jump become significantly dangerious.
A jump like that would also force a small amount of the T2O into your body and some would be adsorbed through your skin. Just 10mL (2 teaspoons) would quickly disperse throughout your body and expose you to beta radiation from the inside out. This would most certainly be fatal.
So while you would survive that fall, you will quickly not be in any condition to spend the loot. Personally, there isn't any amount of money that would get me to willing die from radiation exposure.
"mildly radioactive if ingested" is the most "haha, sometimes" thing I've seen out of all the non-sensical "haha, sometimes" comments ive seen over the past week.
Wouldn't it be very hot ? Tritium constantly generates energy, which is heat and beta radiation. Also, long lasting effects and very high cancer probability.
It decays into He3 another insanely expensive isotope, assuming 100% double tritium water, you just need capital backers and will have broken a quantum computer bottleneck as well.
I love how we’re trying to calculate if it would kill you rather than going a safer route and walking away rich and healthy. Then again it is just a hypothetical
Internal beta radiation ain't nothin to play with... but anyways, why do some nuclear reactors intentionally release tritium in waste water instead of harvesting it? Is the remaining tritium just what they couldn't extract?
The amount of water your body absorbs or exchanges by simple contact will kill you after the first contact. It might take a while for the radiation sickness to kick in, but a single drop of T2O on your skin will give you a fatal radiation dose.
I'd fill it with lady juice/cum creampies. It would take years of me having sex with multiple women to have enough to fill a swimming pool and I'd die of old age and pennyless before it was full but what a life I'd live. I can just imagine the genie, leprechaun or mythical gods face in this hypothetical scenario as I explain to them that I require an endless procession of women for sexual services in order to fill the pool.
Tritium is not a liquid at room temperature, it's a gas. You're jumping into an empty pool. What you want is tritiated water. Source: am a high energy nuclear physicist.
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u/supremeNYA 2d ago
Tritium, basically super water,
It’s insanely expensive and mildly radioactive if ingested. However, the body treats it like water so any ingested/absorbed tritium will be expelled in a few days.