How to Use deuterium in a Sentence

deuterium

noun
  • That team also found signs of deuterium.
    — Joseph Howlett, Scientific American, 24 Apr. 2026
  • The process would require the fusion of deuterium and tritium.
    — Abhishek Bhardwaj, Interesting Engineering, 18 Aug. 2025
  • The deuterium from a glass of water, with a little tritium added, could power a house for a year.
    — Ella Nilsen, CNN, 12 Dec. 2022
  • Those devices fired a beam of deuterons into a solid target laced with deuterium.
    — Adrian Cho, science.org, 18 July 2024
  • While deuterium is very common and obtained from water, tritium is very rare.
    — Sophie Blondel, The Conversation, 18 Oct. 2024
  • Its fuel, deuterium, can be derived from water.
    — Neetika Walter, Interesting Engineering, 4 Mar. 2026
  • So can the frozen hydrogen inside, a mix of the isotopes deuterium and tritium.
    — David R Baker & Will Wade, oregonlive, 25 Dec. 2022
  • The fuels were deuterium and tritium, rare forms of hydrogen.
    — William J. Broad, New York Times, 22 May 2017
  • The feather will be assayed for deuterium to add to a study of hydrogen isotopes and duck movements.
    — Paul A. Smith, Milwaukee Journal Sentinel, 22 May 2021
  • This generated a plasma field that loaded one side of the target with deuterium.
    — New Atlas, 29 Aug. 2025
  • Deuterium, which is an isotope of hydrogen, has a neutron in its nucleus.
    — National Geographic, 5 June 2016
  • Thus, a relative dearth of deuterium in the atmosphere today suggests that less water may have been lost in this way than was thought.
    — Jonathan O'Callaghan, Scientific American, 18 Mar. 2021
  • Full power operations using a deuterium/tritium fuel mix will be set back by four years.
    — John Timmer, Ars Technica, 5 July 2024
  • The target itself is a tiny hollow shell filled with the heavy hydrogen isotopes deuterium and tritium.
    — Discover Magazine, 29 June 2010
  • The company makes deuterium compounds by extracting it from water and uses them in the diodes.
    — Scharon Harding, Ars Technica, 29 Dec. 2021
  • Those processes in a disk, however, can also warm up comets enough to reduce their deuterium levels.
    — Joseph Howlett, Scientific American, 24 Apr. 2026
  • Whether water in a rocky body contains deuterium depends on the chemical processes that formed it.
    — Joseph Howlett, Scientific American, 24 Apr. 2026
  • One issue is that only one in 6,500 hydrogen atoms is a deuterium atom.
    — Yuen Yiu, Discover Magazine, 16 July 2020
  • But the end goal is to use deuterium and helium-3, which Helion aims to produce by fusing the same deuterium atoms.
    — Jordan Blum, Fortune, 13 Feb. 2026
  • At what rate do the deuterium molecules absorb protons to become helium-3?
    — Caroline Delbert, Popular Mechanics, 13 Nov. 2020
  • According to Daly, the Sun has very low levels of heavy hydrogen called deuterium.
    — Joshua Hawkins, BGR, 7 Dec. 2021
  • Webb is an ideal tool for such a search because the smallest stars—brown dwarfs, which emit light from the fusion of deuterium—are most visible in infrared light.
    — Eric Berger, Ars Technica, 14 Dec. 2023
  • In any case, the reason to differentiate them isn't burning deuterium.
    — Sophie Weiner, Popular Mechanics, 24 Mar. 2018
  • That eliminates the need to freeze the deuterium and tritium at ultralow temperatures.
    — Kenneth Chang, New York Times, 13 Nov. 2023
  • Aidan hit a button that released a small amount of a kind of hydrogen gas called deuterium inside the fusor’s vacuum chamber.
    — Miriam Fauzia, Dallas Morning News, 26 Feb. 2026
  • In less dense areas, a more diminutive version of fusion — deuterium fusion — can occur in smaller objects.
    — Jonathan O’Callaghan, New York Times, 2 Oct. 2023
  • Fusion projects mainly use the elements deuterium and tritium – both of which are isotopes of hydrogen.
    — Ella Nilsen, CNN, 12 Dec. 2022
  • Heavy water, therefore, supplants its two regular hydrogen atoms with two deuterium atoms.
    — Keith Cooper, Space.com, 17 Oct. 2025
  • Earth’s water has a specific ratio of deuterium to hydrogen, Daly says.
    — Melissa Gaskill, Popular Mechanics, 12 July 2023
  • Under the right conditions, deuterium and tritium each will lose an electron and fuse to form one helium atom with two protons and two of the three neutrons.
    — Siddhant Pusdekar, Journal Sentinel, 23 July 2024

Some of these examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'deuterium.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Last Updated: