Murder by Heavy Water?

But if you're the Soviets (or CIA or whoever else) trying to poison a dissident spy or other person of interest, you already have a source of tritium and hopefully an operating budget that can afford the cost of the tritiated water to kill this individual. This thread and some simple research shows that regular heavy water would at best make the target sick and not kill them since you have to replace a huge amount of their liquid intake with heavy water to make things lethal. My question is--is tritiated water more efficient, and to what degree?
100% Tritiated water has a dose factor of 0.000018mSv/kBq. Measurable immediate effects start at 500 mSv and a minimum dose of 8 Sv would be required for a reasonable guarantee of mortality with treatment (note that Tritium is very easy to flush out of the body - the recommended treatment if exposed is to drink as much beer as you can. Seriously.)
That makes a reasonably lethal dose 8000/0.000018 = 4.45 x 10^8 kBq = 445 GBq of Tritium (4.45 x 10^11 Bq)

Now this isn't actually very much by weight - Tritium has a specific activity of 3.57 x 10^14 Bq/g so essentially 1 mg would be a potentially lethal dose. The problem is firstly that Tritium is very hard to get hold of in quantity - my previous job had 20g on site and was subject to regular IAEA audits and safeguards - and secondly that handling it is an absolute pig. In my previous job I was dealing with designs to shift quantities of a few grams of it around a plant and the level of containment required is astonishing - it'll go through pretty much anything, even forged stainless steel given time, and is exceptionally easy to detect. If you thought the Polonium trail left after they killed Litvinenko was obvious, you should see how easy it would be to trace a Tritium trail: it's detectable at 1 part in 10^18 atoms, and would get everywhere (when handling items potentially contaminated with it there would often be a Health Physics technician standing there to check I changed my outer gloves no less than every 10 minutes - any longer and it would go through them and potentially onto my skin).
 

Ryan

Donor
the only way i can think of to have enough control over someones water intake is if they're imprisoned/hospitalized. but if they're in that position then they can be killed in much easier ways.
 
100% Tritiated water has a dose factor of 0.000018mSv/kBq. Measurable immediate effects start at 500 mSv and a minimum dose of 8 Sv would be required for a reasonable guarantee of mortality with treatment (note that Tritium is very easy to flush out of the body - the recommended treatment if exposed is to drink as much beer as you can. Seriously.)
That makes a reasonably lethal dose 8000/0.000018 = 4.45 x 10^8 kBq = 445 GBq of Tritium (4.45 x 10^11 Bq)

Now this isn't actually very much by weight - Tritium has a specific activity of 3.57 x 10^14 Bq/g so essentially 1 mg would be a potentially lethal dose. The problem is firstly that Tritium is very hard to get hold of in quantity - my previous job had 20g on site and was subject to regular IAEA audits and safeguards - and secondly that handling it is an absolute pig. In my previous job I was dealing with designs to shift quantities of a few grams of it around a plant and the level of containment required is astonishing - it'll go through pretty much anything, even forged stainless steel given time, and is exceptionally easy to detect. If you thought the Polonium trail left after they killed Litvinenko was obvious, you should see how easy it would be to trace a Tritium trail: it's detectable at 1 part in 10^18 atoms, and would get everywhere (when handling items potentially contaminated with it there would often be a Health Physics technician standing there to check I changed my outer gloves no less than every 10 minutes - any longer and it would go through them and potentially onto my skin).

So from what I get at, it has the same issues as regular heavy water then--if the target is drinking from any source besides the tainted water, they will survive. It's just tritiated water will kill them faster than regular heavy water at the cost of being far more expensive. And if you can poison any liquid they're drinking, then you could probably find a better and cheaper way to kill them.
 
Tritiated water is lethal at vastly lower doses than Deuterated water, because it also has the radiotoxity issue. It's just a pig to use as a poison, far too easy to get contamination everywhere and a risk to the poisoner. Deuterated water is utterly harmless unless you drink it in large quantities.
 

Delta Force

Banned
the only way i can think of to have enough control over someones water intake is if they're imprisoned/hospitalized. but if they're in that position then they can be killed in much easier ways.

Maybe, but it seems heavy water might not raise as many suspicions as a poison. After all, it wouldn't show up on radiation tests and it's very difficult to use as a poison. It would surprise me if anyone has been hospitalized for heavy water ingestion.
 
If heavy water poisoning would not be detected during a normal autopsy/toxicology scan, it would be a good assassination method.
Start by kidnapping and dragging them to a hot place: desert or engine room of a ship.
Offer them plenty of bottled water.
Bonus points if they are a religious fanatic and the water was blessed by a priest.
More bonus points if you can convince them that this is a religious retreat and hot-yoga is part of he religious experience.
Triple puns points if ou can convince them that one of the faithful - sweating alongside them - is equall committed and can be trusted with inside information.
At the end of the "religious retreat" drop their corpse at thier front door.
 
Maybe, but it seems heavy water might not raise as many suspicions as a poison. After all, it wouldn't show up on radiation tests and it's very difficult to use as a poison. It would surprise me if anyone has been hospitalized for heavy water ingestion.
A highly elaborate and complicated poisoning that demands complete control over the victim's water intake is going to leave a lot more trails and raise suspicion, there'd be no reason to ever go that route beyond the sheer novelty of it. You could have a serial killer that likes to kidnap victims and poison them this way, but assassinations don't make any sense.
 
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