The most official water costs $120k a gallon (signoregalilei.com)

Loved reading this. Thank you!

Reminds of me of the "most expensive peanut butter" at ~$2.44/g - sold by NIST, I assume for some sort of peanut butter factory process calibration: https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=2387

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This is why we should ditch Celsius for Kelvin. I never liked how we coupled 0 and 100 to where water freezes and boils under certain conditions. Kelvin doesn't rely on non-invariant reference points.

As specialized world-class lab supplies and reagents go, that is not very expensive. Stuff like pure Xe (for space thrusters) can be more by mass.

A US gallon of deuterium water costs roughly $2,600 to $3,800, while a gallon of pure tritium water (super-heavy water) would cost about $44 million.

gallon is not a si unit ;)

Interesting article but left me wondering why they don't use ¹H₂¹⁶O as the "standard water"? Surely you can make that (relatively) easily in a centrifuge by spinning out the lightest fraction of water.

How does the water taste?

most needs for such water are for calibration of instruments - many labs run stable isotopes measurements which has many applications from tracing how plants use water to measuring your metabolic base rate .. so the main use case it to calibrate instruments because it's really difficult to have an absolute measurement of stable isotope ratios from first principles - and the ratios are so small you typically express them in relation to standards like VSMOW

Slap the 'organic' label on it and sell it at restaurants for $150k/L. It will sell.

I can't help but read VSMOW as Very Standard Mean Ocean Water.

I got mine at a NIST surplus sale for just $55k/gallon. I think it was mismarked.

OK I just made the whole story up

Idk I feel like if you bought in bulk you would get a discount on the additional mL purchased.

NIST Cigarettes are a mere $204 per carton.

Depending on what state you live in, that's not bad these days.

https://shop.nist.gov/ccrz__ProductDetails?sku=1196a&cclcl=e...

So to fill a typical 20,000-gallon pool with this water would cost $2.4 billion.

That might even give a trillionaire pause.

Does NIST have a restaurant?

I hadn't put much thought into why it was called "Vienna Standard Mean Ocean Water".

My first hint should have been that Austria is landlocked.