Richard brings up an interesting point. There might be some value in running with H2 if its discharge characteristics are the same as D2 (I think they are not, else why would they have both Deuterium and Hydrogen thyratrons). If you were designing and building some sort of fancy power supply or pulser, where you wanted to run at a lot of different pressures, etc. then you might go through a fair amount of gas.
However, given that D2 is pretty cheap, and if you are spending the bucks to do a fancy control system, the $100 extra you'll pay for D2 over H2 is probably negligible.
Created on Sunday, January 14, 2001 4:38 PM EDT by James Lux