Hydrogen isotope biogeochemistry spectroscopic lines for publishable data, Murphy and Urey paired with Ferdinand Brickwedde and distilled a more concentrated pool of heavy hydrogen, known today as deuterium. This work on hydrogen isotopes won Urey the 1934 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. Also in 1934, scientists Ernest Rutherford, Mark Oliphant, and Paul Harteck, produced the radioactive isotope tritium by hitting deuterium with high energy nuclei. The deuterium used in the experiment was a generous gift of heavy water from the Berkeley physicist Gilbert N Lewis. Bombarding deuterium produced two previously undetected isotopes, helium-3 and hydrogen-3. Rutherford and his colleagues successfully created tritium, but incorrectly
Tritium boron, cadmium, or hafnium), at the reactors of the commercial Watts Bar Nuclear Generating Station from 2003–2005 followed by extraction of tritium from the rods at the new Tritium Extraction Facility at the Savannah River Site beginning in November 2006. Tritium leakage from the rods during reactor operations limits the number that can be used in any reactor without exceeding the maximum allowed tritium levels in the coolant. Tritium has an atomic mass of 3.0160492 u. Diatomic tritium ( or ) is a gas at standard temperature and pressure. Combined with oxygen, it forms a liquid called tritiated water ().