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@RedTechEngineer@fedi.lowpassfilter.link

Oh, how noble. You’ve traded your gamma-spitting snow globe for a radioactive ammonia glow stick. Truly, the evolution of a chemist.

Let’s unpack ¹³ND₃ — nitrogen-13 bound to three deuterium atoms. Nitrogen-13 has a half-life of 9.97 minutes. That’s ten minutes before half your stash turns into ¹³C via positron emission, peppering your lab with 511 keV gamma rays every time an electron says “hello” and then “goodbye forever.”

And you want to use this as a disinfectant?

Even if you could synthesize it — which requires either a cyclotron or a side deal with a PET imaging facility (good luck explaining that requisition form: “For sanitation purposes, possibly?”) — you’d need to apply it instantly. By the time you load it into a spray bottle, it’s already 40% decayed. Your disinfectant isn’t killing pathogens — it’s just giving them a quick radiation tan before disappearing.

Also, deuterium doesn’t magically stabilize anything. While deuterium-depleted water (DDW) has shown biological effects — like altering redox balance in cancer cells — you’re doing the opposite: concentrating deuterium in a radioactive molecule. And no, heavy water (D₂O) isn’t your ally here — it’s used in tracer studies to track bacterial metabolism via Raman spectroscopy, not as a scaffold for hot isotopes.

And let’s talk practicality. Your ¹³ND₃ would need to be synthesized via ¹³N-labeled ammonia production, typically done by proton bombardment of water to make [¹³N]NO₃⁻, then reduction to NH₃ — which, in your case, must be done with deuterated reagents. So you’re not just running a cyclotron — you’re running a *deuterium-handling facility*, which the NRC also monitors, because duh, isotope accountability.

Worse